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“... real for more and more citizens. The Challenge of Affluence is a frontal assault on this view. Avner Offer is an economic historian who has long been concerned with figuring out what matters most to quality of life. And what the book tells us, in some 450 amply annotated pages (he seems to have read every relevant source in the social sciences), is ...”

“... fought, successfully, to maintain their monopoly over conveyancing, thereby establishing what Avner Offer has called ‘a permanent rent-charge on the value of land and buildings’. But in the balance between physical property and its intangible associations, the ‘two narratives’ Fitz-Gibbon refers to, it was the estate agents who were ...”

“... amid the reminiscence and the engaging but heteroclite reflections, any distinctive theory is on offer. The theory is buried in much other matter, but it is there. Political philosophy errs in formulating ideal principles of justice, which afford little help in resolving competing claims in our non-ideal world. In this world, the claims of justice are ...”

“... lobbyists can step in just before a committee session starts; ‘concierge’ medical companies offer queue-jumping treatment to those willing to stump up the fees. Firms pay people to sport temporary tattoos of company logos on their foreheads. Inuit sell their hunters’ vouchers to vacationing gunslingers eager to blow walruses away at point-blank ...”

“... a week in which to invent for everyone a credible past and to create the proofs of it.’Simply to offer to make papers for someone – Kaminsky paid house calls to many Jewish families, urging them to accept his help – was to put his life in a stranger’s hands. His warnings to Jews about the extermination camps were sometimes met with disbelief, even ...”