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“... Of course, we should have reservations about the use of anecdote as a basis for public policy. Richard Posner once remarked that the United States is a nation of more than a quarter-billion people closely watched by a horde of journalists. Every bad thing that can happen will happen and it will be reported; so it may be worth not panicking until we see ...”

“... But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan American politics took a conservative turn. Democrats are still divided over how to respond.Today, an air of foreboding hangs over the party. Despite the rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, Joe Biden’s approval rating ...”

“... Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that ...”

“... expense of creditors and stockholders. And if savers are also small shareholders, as many are, the price they pay for protecting their deposits is the devaluation of their shares. This is absolutely not what was originally intended. The rationing of house building has one other consequence: it means that many cannot acquire somewhere adequate to live. As a way ...”

“... dismissed (which is pretty much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing ...”

“... Cradock points out, the apparent Soviet triumph in squashing Dubcek carried a huge long-term price. It was soon apparent that disagreement within what Brezhnev called ‘the Socialist Commonwealth’ would lead to military suppression. Albania immediately walked out of the Warsaw Pact, and the Chinese, after much reflection, contacted ...”

“... Coote’s recent biography, or the sensitive but work-obsessed administrator who figures in Richard Ollard’s excellent but now rather elderly Life. Tomalin cannot compete with Ollard’s lovingly detailed understanding of Pepys’s work as a Naval administrator, and Ollard remains the best guide to the professional Pepys (his biography is still ...”

“... smaller scales or much good at making money was somehow no obstacle to their admiration.) When the price of oil rocketed in the 1970s, mainstream America began to take seriously the counterculture’s dream of redesigning industrial society. Solar panels flourished, empty six-packs became the bricks for houses, fish grew to edible size in plastic tanks and ...”

“... so full of life, so packed with jolly anecdotes, would be bound to fetch a more than handsome price if offered for general sale. Might there not be a way of having his cake and eating it too? Hogarth’s answer was to advertise a ‘subscription’, a raffle. Visitors to his studio were invited to inspect the painting there, where they could buy one or ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... of an industry grew up to massage the bruised national ego – see for instance Kipling’s Sir Richard Dalyngridge stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). The Normans weren’t really French, after all, the argument went, just transplanted Vikings, which on the Victorian ethnic map made them almost relatives. But there was ...”

“... and, if the neighbourhood did not make it socially pretty samey, then the outrageous price of the latte did. No one was smoking – it’s banned – and many of the customers were women. All of this makes the coffee house I go to a very different sort of place from those that proliferated in London from the middle of the 17th century; but ...”

“... energy so effectively that he achieved only superficial changes (the main one being to lower the price to a penny). He complained that reforming the culture at Printing House Square was ‘like filling a pneumatic tyre with a leak in it’, and suggested that ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ should be inscribed over its ...”

“... impose a shape on experience: to let life have its messiness, and let the book pay the necessary price in terms of formal imperfection. Anthony Powell’s four-volume memoirs, published from 1976 to 1982, are something of a masterpiece in this mode, combining a deceptive casualness of manner with an almost epigrammatical density of insight. Its pen portraits ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”