“... in life itself. Thus Rutland, the ‘Joke county, smallest in England’, is real because it once held     my old Friend, Bill Partridge. Dead now. Had you noticed? How heavy that weighs, how wide the narrowest shire! Because all space forms itself round the loved, who become more and more, as time passes, the loved dead, all counties really are alike ...”

“... music is common. It’s as though people felt the true greatness of the music was somehow held in check, always imminent but never altogether revealed. ‘He wouldn’t give himself. He always stopped. He wouldn’t quite go over the top,’ Robert Tear thinks, and Michael Tippett speaks wistfully of Britten’s ‘immense possibilities’. Those ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... degree of direct governmental control was the necessary safeguard against a return to what were held to be the unpalatable but otherwise inescapable consequences of unfettered market capitalism. What mattered was that authority should be entrusted to an effective non-partisan bureaucracy on which Labour ministers could rely. In all this I have said nothing ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... class which had been inconvenienced by austerity and the postwar lack of servants but which still held on to its country seats and its influence. Another was the world of the two ‘historic’ English universities – the ‘top’ colleges of Oxford in particular. Trevor-Roper was captured by the second, and married into the first. Enemies invariably called ...”

“... waterpipes and dams connected and hidden in one vast, intricate network beneath the earth, which held civilisation safe from chaos and disease: the common hydraulic wealth.I must confess that there was little more to Lucas Arnow than this, and he appears a little small and dry when set beside the fanaticism and inner visionary power of Nicodemus. When I ...”

“... The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money. It has sometimes happened to the Yapese that their boats are hit by stormy weather on the way back from Palau, and to save their own lives, the men have to chuck the big stones overboard. But when they get back to Palau ...”

“... who had served in the Soviet Forces were cast out by others who had avoided war service and who held that to have worn a Soviet uniform was a fatal taint. The result was the so-called Scab War, which provoked huge bloodletting between the vory and the suki (‘bitches’), as they were called – the latter conceding the heavier losses. Handelman says that ...”

“... It is not easy to say what this book is about, other than by amplifying its subtitle. It is not held together by any argument that I can see; indeed, there is practically no analysis in it. In Waller’s own words, it ‘conjures up aspects of literary life in late 19th and early 20th-century England’. One sense of ‘conjure up’ is ‘cause to appear ...”

“... a number that doesn’t include detained migrants, prisoners of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, those held at Guantánamo Bay etc.In the 1976 primaries Biden had been an early supporter of Carter. In 1980 he served as a lacklustre campaign surrogate, saying on the stump: ‘Let’s face it, Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the ...”

“... levels in piston engines and gas turbines paled into insignificance. You could make things you held in your hand.’ The British style of rocketry, it’s clear, did not banish the sublime. How could it, when the alternative to elegance was a fireball. But Zeus’ fire was confined to a matchbox. At first the Black Arrow launcher had no official budget ...”

“... and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on the ...”

“... they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently of their catastrophe. But in 1950, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law which still forbids Selma Tawil and the other 750,000 Palestinians from ever returning – if they left their homes in ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”