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“... the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his ...”

“... or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book reminds a reader that had he been a retired colonel living in Brighton in 1942, and invited an actress from London down for the weekend, he could have been smartly fined and threatened with imprisonment next time. The reason? The coastal belt was ...”

“... to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have turned into a veritable genre. The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism, like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sickroom, which reports on her five-year-long retreat from ...”

“... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...”

“... Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends ...”

“... and fragile’, ‘the Venice of the new millennium’.* New York – or Manhattan, more precisely the subject of Gopnik’s book – has indeed become like Venice, but not because it’s fragile. It is more of a resort city than ever. This transformation occurred despite 9/11 – plans to make Manhattan ...”

“... Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them ...”

“... taking down a shorthand transcript of what is being said, a skill she normally employs in much more exalted circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only ...”

“... revolution was the major factor in all the other revolutions with which we are concerned, more important than the Turkish conquest, the discovery and colonisation of America or the imperial vocation of Spain. Had it not been for the increase in the number of men, would any of these glorious chapters ever have been written?... The increase lay behind ...”

“... most of the opportunity. Enormous posters of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were everywhere to be seen. More important, Negrin treated the Russians as indispensable friends. But the Republicans had no alternative beyond the unacceptable one of making peace. Given Negrin’s need for arms and the refusal of the British and French to supply them on anything like the ...”

“... lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag’ – makes living in it somehow more tolerable. The implication is not quite that the unexamined life is not worth living, rather that an unexamined world isn’t worth living in. ‘Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort.’ These ...”

“... reason for his dejection: his mother, who was visiting, left eight days before, and he misses her more than he wants to admit. Chaudhuri is a master of the inconsequential detail, or rather of describing quotidian, often overlooked details that matter to the character observing or experiencing them, or take on a new consequence in his describing of ...”

“... and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s peering into the brightly lit mouths of his patients: My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if ...”

“... virtues also, the first and foremost being that it is a splendid work of research. An appendix of more than a hundred pages – it is a massive volume – lists almost a hundred and fifty middle-class Victorian collectors, with brief biographies and details of their occupations, taste and methods of buying. (Surprisingly, she omits Alexander ...”

“... on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James ...”