“... populations were not sent to the gas chambers. That is, the descendents of Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all present in huge numbers in the United States, also fairly quickly lost their languages. (The only great exceptions here are the immigrants from Latin America, who have ...”

“... marked and ribbed by power and wealth. But Clare, unlike Burns, opposed those he called ‘the French Levellers’ – he saw the Revolutionaries as analogous to rapacious English enclosers – and in 1808 he joined the Eastern regiment of the Northampton militia. His military service involved only a few weeks of training, but he remained technically an ...”

“... development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out of a few hundred yards of old degraded Hackney ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... and my job was to promote Anglo-German relations.Had you done German at school?No, not at all. French and Latin, I’d done. In Germany I had to write the scripts for a radio programme; I had to write local-boy stories, stories which commemorated a proud day in the life of Blank from Blank. Such and such a grand person came to visit etc, and then you took ...”

“... for lending the sovereign a great deal of gold, in the first instance to build a navy to fight the French, the Bank of England acquired the right to print paper money. That paper money could then be used by ordinary people to pay their taxes. It’s at this point that banks, money and the modern state become fused together. The money system and the banks and ...”

“... system safer, the answer again is that we don’t really know. As the financial historian David Marsh observed, the only way you can properly test a firewall is by having a fire. I think the ring-fence is an opportunity missed. That goes for a lot of the small complicated rules designed to make banks and the financial system safer. Bankers complain ...”

“... and Forster’s mother, but Bess quickly got jealous and forbade ‘Tom’ to go to any more ‘French lessons’ at the Forsters’, timed while Lily was out shopping. The following year, though, Forster notes, ‘Tom came at last – but says his name is Dudley.’ Further encounters follow: ‘Tom 4 in all’; ‘Lust + goodwill – is anything more ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... and come upon the war memorial. It’s of a soldier, solid and even squat, looking as much French as English and though it’s strictly representational with something of Vorticism about it, like a three-dimensional version of the figures that populate the paintings of William Roberts. There’s a reluctance about the soldier, too, the heaviness of the ...”

“... given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original recording was made in 1903), the fabled French actress sounds like Minnie Mouse on speed. She gabbles her way through ‘Oui, Prince, je brûle pour Thésée’ at a mad, cartoonish pace, ’r’s unrolling wildly in every direction. (Watch your head!) The reviewer dotes on her deranged-chipmunk ...”

“... in some of the poetic, theoretical talk in the best of these coffee-table tomes, the Polish-French photographer Nicolas Grospierre’s Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture. ‘For me,’ Grospierre insists, ‘modernism, and architectural modernism in particular, is the embodiment of one of the greatest ideas in the history of ...”

“... that a new sort of liberal polity demanded the rejection of absolutist forms of punishment. (The French Constitution of 1791, which created a short-lived constitutional monarchy, got rid of the death penalty entirely except for treason.) By the middle years of the 19th century, the debate on capital punishment in the US had a more explicitly republican tone ...”

“... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”