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“... At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was a pale shadow of what it had been two decades earlier. Thanks to the FBI, the McCarthy hearings in the Senate and the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives, blacklists, firings and generalised fear, the Party’s ranks had been radically thinned. And still it lived ...”

“... renewed, but it turned out that the most resistant trees were the least productive. Ford called in James Weir, a specialist in tropical rubber who had worked for Goodyear in Sumatra. He proposed bud-grafting using South-East Asian plant material: taking a proven root-stock and grafting onto it a shoot from productive and resistant stock. This worked, but it ...”

“... Mycenaean kingdoms of the Mediterranean, the break-up of the Roman Empire in the fifth century ce, and contemporary Somalia. Scheidel’s analysis of the world wars and global depression of the first half of the 20th century forms a close parallel to Piketty’s account of how these catastrophes ‘compressed’ income distribution. In this period, where ...”

“... models. Anthropology can show us radically different and satisfying forms of human affiliation and co-operation that do not depend on the nuclear family or inherited wealth. History can show that the social and political arrangements we take for granted are the contingent result of a unique historical conjuncture. Jared Diamond, ornithologist, evolutionary ...”

“... There is no doubt that the Great Leap Famine in China more than half a century ago was the worst man-made calamity of modern times. Between early 1958 and the spring of 1961, somewhere between 30 and 45 million people died. The more cautious figure is five million more than the population of Scandinavia, the higher one the current population of Spain ...”

“... in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre state’, ‘agricultural involution’ and quite a few ...”

“... serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should. In Seeing like a State, James Scott is definitely in storytelling mode, though he seems unaware of the narrative biases that result. (It makes me curious to know what he’s like when he travels by air, which as an anthropologist he must do quite often.) He has two kinds of story ...”

“... piles, pox and plague. Harington’s great innovation in domestic hygiene was so successful that James I is supposed to have brought him in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax ...”

“... to infantry service: ‘I’ve got a certain amount of mechanical knowledge and I think my CO would recommend a transfer on the ground of being married.’ On 24 September he wrote: ‘We are in a bust-up tomorrow so I thought I’d let you know’ (this would become the British offensive at Loos). Then: The artillery starts today. I only told the ...”

“... the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... epistolary novel The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, published in 1806. A century later, James Joyce drew attention to the supposed links between Ireland and the Phoenicians in a lecture entitled ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’. Speaking in Trieste, he said that the Irish language ‘is eastern in origin, and has been identified by many ...”

“... pulpit. It does contain subtleties, even in the brass section, but it’s seldom averse to a yell. James Hogg could sound polished when he felt like it, but he was thought noisy by the aspiring Edinburgh gentry. They were eager for lessons in belletristic politeness, and knew he could be vulgar and uncouth. He knew they knew it, too. Hogg was a ...”

“... of Guermantes, the narrator says, ‘appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter’. Scott Moncrieff, the earlier and best-known translator of Proust, is in this case quite literal about the famous sentence, and gives us ‘the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost,’ although even here there is a little slither, since in the ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”