“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... father-son reunion, though: ‘On either side of the door they stood, a hand raised and a hand held forth, their extended arms abscissa and ordinate for the point of ordination where their eyes met on the inordinate curve of doubt.’ The door between them is closed as a matter of physical fact, so the meeting of their eyes can only be a symbolic ...”

“... the idea of reading. While novelists who wrote in formed, settled and multi-layered societies held a mirror up to those societies in all their variety or to the vicissitudes of the human heart, Borges and O’Brien and Pessoa held instead a mirage up to an oasis, the strange place they came from which gave them their ...”

“... woman director. Working from a banc-titre – an animation stand with a mounted camera that held the lens perfectly still – Varda took more than four thousand photographs.She spliced fifteen hundred of them together into Salut les Cubains (1963), timing the transitions to music so that the images danced. Varda then set the whole thing against her ...”

“... Leone, which is currently the company’s biggest area of operations. Last February Sierra Leone held its first multi-party elections since 1977. The transition to democracy was negotiated under the aegis of an unstable military leadership; the election was taking place six weeks after an officers’ coup had replaced the president; parts of the country were ...”

“... is important and not merely pedantic (though it is that as well) lies in a meeting that was held on 21 December 1988, four months after the end of the Gulf War. Present were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about ...”

“... first stage of Abacha’s transition programme spelt out the previous October. The elections were held on a ‘zero-party’ basis, ostensibly in recognition of Nigeria’s ‘historical and cultural peculiarities’, but in reality to enable the Government to ban suspect candidates at will. In one state alone, nearly a hundred would-be councillors were ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... makes his success even harder to understand. What was it about him that – despite all this – held so many in his spell? In his dealings with Dee, the sheer scale of his deception is staggering. Dee left reams of manuscripts recording the messages of angels and spirits, all of them dictated to him by Kelley: the ‘spirituall diaries’, as they are ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... is never to identify its informant … don’t talk about Lobby meetings BEFORE or AFTER they are held … Do not ‘see’ anything in the Member’s Lobby or any of the private rooms or corridors of the Palace of Westminster … Do not run after a Minister or Private Member … When a member of the Lobby is in conversation with a Minister, MP or ...”

“... dust’. Like le grand Cobb, he loathes Pompidou and all his works – which should not be held to include the Centre Pompidou, since the politician bitterly opposed the Piano-Rogers design, even though it ended up being named after him. (Hazan will therefore only use the building’s alternative title, the Centre Beaubourg – which, in any ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... stance to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”