“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... death of her infant son, and shot herself at his grave when Jamie was fourteen.Lynne, a teacher, held the family together with prayer and potato salad. Compared to her ‘reckless, cold and mean’ father, Britney paints Lynne as passive and avoidant, unwilling or unable to leave her husband or to stand up for her daughter. Lynne’s mother, Lily, was a war ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Evans would have felt keenly. In his American exile, he has never been short of work, and has held a bewildering variety of magazine and publishing jobs, which he writes about with his usual puppyish enthusiasm (‘the galaxy of writers in the history of Random House was stunning,’ he says, before listing 28 names from the galaxy). Even so, between ...”

“... book will undoubtedly become the standard account of the Russian aspect of the Napoleonic wars. David Bell has recently argued that Napoleon introduced ‘total war’ to Europe. Following the 1789 Revolution, all male Frenchmen, on reaching a certain age, were called up as citizens to the armed forces. As a result of the levée en masse the French army ...”

“... drink at the weekends only – standard alcoholic strategy – and during an engagement party we held for some friends from her law school I drank several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero (the party was Spanish-themed) I had found at a good case-price. I remember eyeing my wife as she sat on our couch next to a handsome young attorney. She was ...”