Where it is spreading, in poor, agrarian and broken places, the “invisible threads” that bind India, in the phrase of Nehru, its first prime minister, are almost non-existent.
Received opinion holds, in the phrase of Auguste Comte, a 19th-century social scientist, that "demography is destiny" and that Europe is doomed by its death-spiral population Numbers.
If he gets them through, he will have demonstrated to the rest of the world that Japan is not, in the phrase of one observer, just a fly waiting for a windscreen.
It has put itself (in the phrase of a Coca-Cola executive with a literary bent) "always within an arm's length of desire."