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“... bears.’ But it followed equally that anyone, of any race, might shed civilised qualities (“Gross men prefer animal pleasure. So there are men who have preferred living among savages’) or acquire them. The South Sea islander Omai, having been exposed to the ‘best company’, was so ‘genteel’ and had ‘so little of the savage’ that when he and ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... His ‘bourgeois cuteness & desire to know where I am’ limited his options. ‘However gross my desires, I fear that I shall never satisfy them for fear of annoying others.’ At the end of 1911 he feels emotionally paralysed and unable to write. In 1912 he has a ‘shamed sense of unused strength’; in 1913, ‘I shall grow queer and unpopular if ...”

“... that in order to bring the nation’s finances under control (in the wake of the 2008 crash, gross government debt stood at 69 per cent of GDP), it would be necessary to reduce government borrowing by £120 billion within five years, to be achieved overwhelmingly by reducing government expenditure: public sector pay would be frozen; welfare benefits ...”

“... is known, the type of population can be found. Birth and death rates are set down, and then the Gross Reproduction Rate is calculated. Family reconstitution supplies other figures, the proportion of the population married and the age of marriage, but this information is less secure than other types. Like an old building, the total structure has some parts ...”

“... Lowell is only to be so described when he is writing at his lowest ebb and, rather than leave John Berryman out altogether, I have selected work by him which may well though not indisputably be judged unrepresentative – since if poetry is a public matter it is not the place for private revelations, and if it is not a public matter it has no place in a ...”

“... by which it can be drawn upwards to love: ‘Ascend through declension/the mass the matter/the gross refinement/gravitas.’ That swirl of ascent and descent through gravity can lead, etymologically, through the Latin pondus, towards pondering, or weighing: ‘imponderables brought home/to the brute mass and detail of the world;/there, by some, to be ...”

“... is in dissent, the senior justice in the majority does the assigning. The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia ...”

“... With taxation, as with other matters, the passage of time is the creator of legitimacy. The gross imperfections of long-established taxes come to be tolerated while the lesser failings of a new tax are seized on. As a result, any existing tax system is like a museum of measures that have yielded revenue without provoking rebellion. Taxes serve their ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... Brazil today has a larger population and gross national product than Yeltsin’s Russia. Yet, against all reason, it continues to occupy a curiously marginal position in the contemporary historical consciousness. In 15 years it has left virtually no trace in these pages. Popular images, despite increasing tourism, remain scanty: folk-villains on the run, seasonal parades in fancy-dress, periodic football triumphs ...”

“... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”