“... book. Instead it’s an angry and bitter account that confirms the view of the financial system held by its critics. It is also a story of trauma. After he makes his killing, Stevenson spends his bonus on a flat, not because he wants one, but because he knows that the rich – who are the beneficiaries of zero interest rates – put their money into ...”

“... in my mother’s second-hand Humber. They were still more acquaintances than friends, having never held hands, let alone kissed: their first kiss would happen nearly a year after Newbury. But my parents-to-be had much in common, as yet unearthed, especially the unhappy secret of being children in disintegrating and disintegrated marriages.On 11 January, after ...”

“... on Clydeside, 1893-1932, and, in Glasgow at least, the ILP and BSP ‘shared similar policies and held joint demonstrations’ and were involved in both political and industrial activism (nationally, the SDF/BSP was much less radical, opposed to industrial unrest and in favour of rearmament, than Maclean’s Scottish section). The left remained a small ...”

“... one would expect from any collection of pictures, except for the jarring and very public Star of David which feels eerily as if it had invaded the private space of the pictures without its bearers having noticed. There were 1536 such pictures in the first, 1994 French edition; 1834 in the 1995 edition; another 497 in a January 1996 supplement; and a further ...”

“... he was a celebrity. French writers and American expatriates flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held court a short walk from his Left Bank flat. ‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in ...”

“... 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 ...”