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“... sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. It takes money to provide the exuberant childhood that Wordsworth celebrates in his ‘Immortality Ode’: glorious in the might Of untamed pleasures That factory boys and young mill-hands should be denied this was bad ...”

“... at Nasa had claimed the programme would have a success rate of 99.999 per cent. Petroski cites Richard Feynman, who, observing that this implied the space agency ‘could put up a shuttle each day for three hundred years expecting to lose only one’, asked: ‘What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?’ It wasn’t shared by ...”

“... Cohen considers the idea of ‘market socialism’: a system that would still be based on the price mechanism but would prevent the concentration of capital that produces the gross inequalities of the capitalist market. On balance, this would, for him, be better than nothing. It is ‘the genius of the market that it recruits low-grade motives to ...”

“... also to have his children brought into the world with teeth, after the manner of Richard III’. Bowes seems not to have minded claiming the child (‘a small price to pay’, Moore decides, ‘for the spectacular fortune he now possessed’). The other children were sent away to various schools. He obliged ...”

“... wax harvested from sperm whales were of much better quality but cost twice as much. In the 1850s, Price’s Patent Candle Company (PPCC) found a way to make palm oil candles that were white and didn’t smell, even when the raw oil was rancid. The candles were named Belmont Sperm – a link to the expensive spermaceti candles, though palm oil was even cheaper ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... Ionian calm in ‘Un Voyage à Cythère’ – is no more than a faint breeze around the ankles. Richard Aldington, who could often be found sucking where the bee sucks, produced an unfortunate version that does much the same: ‘Now here, now there, as the wind sways, sway we.’ And Peter Dale, always pushed for rhymes, has the bodies on his gibbets turn ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... into the Republican camp, though not all of them formally switched their party registrations. Richard Perle, a leading figure in the Republican defence establishment known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’, remains a registered Democrat. Among the neoconservative Democrats who moved over to join the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, Donald ...”

“... say a weapon: chicanery.’ And: ‘Smiles are rare in ancient art. Tranquillity was bought at the price of tension and renunciation – hallmarks of the ancient world as much as of the world of the samurai or of Queen Victoria.’ And: ‘The puritanism of the upper class did not rest on sexuality: it rested on sexuality as a possible source of moral ...”

“... city – had been razed and looted by the British because its chief, Nana Olomu, objected to the price they had offered for his palm oil. Nana was forced into exile, just as King Jaja of Opobo had been in the 1880s. Jaja, a former slave, had developed a network of palm oil trading houses along the River Niger but in a fit of overconfidence he had attempted ...”

“... and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints. It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of ...”

“... mural and inadvertently reveals his defection plan to his assistant Max by offering him a bargain price on his Wartburg. Max tries to dissuade him: ‘Kurt, in the West they don’t even do painting anymore. These days painting is considered bourgeois.’ To which Kurt replies: ‘I thought for them “bourgeois” was good?’ Even if your art exhibits ...”

“... of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about ...”