“... Holland. In fact, one of the most notorious London auctions of the 1830s was devoted to them. On 7 May 1835, Samuel Sotheby began his sale of what he described as ‘many original and unpublished manuscripts, and printed books with MS annotations, by Philipp Melancthon [sic]’, an erudite Renaissance Hellenist, more eirenic and less bold than his close friend ...”

“... has borrowed from monetarist and Lucasian thinking. As the Stanford economist John Taylor – who may not be Blinder’s kind of new Keynesian, but is a new Keynesian nonetheless – put it, ‘the rational expectations hypothesis is by far the most common expectations assumption used in macroeconomic research today.’ Taylor even claims that the origins of ...”

“... who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than ...”

“... of her great theatre pieces, with the help of her surviving original dancers; and these may provide the core of work on which a lasting artistic reputation can rest – one that will continue to demand comparisons with great modern painters, composers and poets.In speaking of her fundamental contribution, it’s important to insist that she was an ...”

“... contractual courtesy: a name, banished from the cover, tucked out of sight on the half-title. It may be a superstition, but the ghost is rarely represented in the gallery of photographs. There are no staged intimacies, arms around shoulders, triumphal gestures. Perhaps it would be too unnerving if we discovered that these sagas of thuggery and revenge were ...”

“... to South Africa? So it’s that bad? My translator’s brother is an apiarist in Plovdiv. He may not be an apiarist much longer, though, because this year all his bees have been born without wings. Without wings? ‘It is a mutation.’ What causes it? ‘We do not know.’ Other apiarists have found the same. Chernobyl? ‘We do not know.’ In Bulgaria ...”

“... stepping into the fray as Docs’ Joshua, sums up the feeling best when he says here: ‘Hunter may be the reincarnation of Lono – the God returned after 1500 years of wandering like a lovesick child to save his people – and his beloved American Constitution ... He is your saviour and he is guardian of all you profess to hold dear. In his weirdness he ...”

“... as ex-President Giscard make ponderous remarks about immigrants having to ‘remember that they may have rights, but they have duties too’ in such a way as to suggest that immigrants are falling down on their duties in some unexplained way. But the key mechanism is PR: it forces Chirac to compete with Le Pen; Giscard with Chirac; even the Socialist ...”

“... for the new constitutional plans for South Africa with the gloomy conclusion that the conflict ‘may beexpected to tend gradually towards anarchy, in which the quality of life for everyone, black and white, wouldbe destroyed’. In such an event, he asks himself, would there be any relevance in the fact that Transkei was independent? Answer: scarcely ...”

“... a lover too often lest Special Claims Control squads accuse you of ‘cohabiting’. But you may well be living in conditions which would put even lovers off visiting you. Beatrix Campbell’s descriptions of the environments created by Planners who Knew that common people should live in jerry-built estates and shaky tower blocks will not surprise any ...”

“... building where my brother worked as a staff member. I had forgotten that it was the first of May, but the columns of the Forward building were completely draped in red and a large throng stood before the building listening to a speaker. We crossed the bridge to Brooklyn and a new area of New York revealed itself to me. It was less crowded, had almost no ...”

“... Metaphysical vogue which was popular in the academies, with archaic spelling and rhyme (‘I may waste my days no more/pining in spirituall warre’), and these clash disastrously with the burning guilts and desires which anxiously lurk beneath the poem’s surface, desperate to be confessed. It wasn’t until he met Williams in 1950 that he realised ...”

“... hours of cigarette-squashing and clock-dismantling, an effortless instant. Replicas of the earring may be purchased in the museum shop.The museum logo is a butterfly and, in the scene with the butterfly earring, Füsun is 18 and the narrator is 30. I don’t usually care for Nabokov references and I’m not crazy about butterflies, but I found The Museum of ...”

“... Kennan’s modest agenda for thawing relations with Belgrade. Kennan left government for good in May 1963. Yugoslavia’s estrangement from Moscow, unrest in Poland, rebellion in Hungary, Khrushchev’s destalinisation campaign and the Sino-Soviet split made it apparent that the notion of a monolithic communist threat was no longer justified by the ...”

“... Rise. The sinister weapons hidden in the water tower of the Bow Quarter, originally the Bryant & May Factory, he dedicated to Annie Besant, who led the match girls’ strike in 1888, and who later interested herself in Theosophy and succeeded Madame Blavatsky as the international leader of that movement. The deployment in Epping Forest, close to the base ...”