“... Gillain, who, you discover, died in 1821 after spending years trying to free a writer unjustly held in the Bastille. Arriving at her tombstone is a confrontation. Even if you weren’t already thinking that every skull stacked here represents a person who also had parents and lovers and wondered what to have for dinner – or that every pair of femurs is ...”

“... country will tolerate such a conservative deal. On the same day as the European elections, Bremen held a vote, which brought another historic defeat for the SPD. Having ruled the city uninterruptedly since 1945, it took only 25 per cent of the vote. The ‘winner’ was the CDU. But it cannot govern alone, which makes the Greens the kingmakers. To the dismay ...”

“... prices high and managers’ share options valuable. By 2002, only eight US corporations still held Moody’s highest, Aaa rating. Ratings help determine the costs faced by a corporation or government. The lower your rating, the higher the rate of interest you have to pay on your bonds and the more it costs you to service your debt, and this last can be a ...”

“... used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget that there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t . . . and that all those other people are fools … You’ll be thinking ...”

“... employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering nothing less than one of the world’s most flexible modern work permit systems. To maintain a buoyant economy we need to ensure employers can quickly fill key posts where shortages exist.’ This ...”

“... the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic ...”

“... mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the frontier, which was not our fiction, held us in its sway. What’s special about the Western? The cowboy hero, as Robert Warshow said in his essay on the genre, carries a gun but uses it only when he must: the Western doesn’t just tell violent stories, it tells stories about the meaning, the ...”

“... or directed or narrated by people with a background in business or an interest in business think. David Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky and the performance director of British Cycling – and therefore the man behind Britain’s eight gold medals in cycling at London 2012 and the Tour de France victories of Wiggins and Froome – studied sports ...”

“... he declared, not because the music was any good but because Debussy and Ravel had inexplicably held it to be.Satie was partly rescued by John Cage, who in the late 1950s took to championing his work. A tribute to Satie by Cage appeared in the Art News Annual of 1958. Much of it concerns the Musique d’ameublement, a proto-ambient piece from 1920 that ...”

“... been gentleman merchants in Norfolk. They had served the dukes of Norfolk when the Mowbray family held that title. The Mowbray line came to an end in 1481, but before that Charles’s grandfather had married into the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters ...”

“... and other pre-emptive acts of violence. Another neo-con, the New York Times columnist David Brooks, recently blasted the CIA’s ‘bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians’ and praised those analysts who make ‘novelistic judgments’ informed by ‘history, literature, philosophy and theology’. Rumsfeld’s war on the ...”

“... on the mainland: it outsources their detention to Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where they are held in prison camps in which reports of abuse are common. But the threat can also be deployed in a more abstract way: the EU’s Dublin regulation aims to prevent many refugees from gaining access to the better-equipped asylum systems in northwest Europe by ...”

“... his mother in the late 1920s. After studying law he joined the French air force in 1938, but was held back from the front line by suspicion of his foreign background and/or by antisemitism. When Pétain signed the armistice Gary stole a plane with some friends, made his way to Britain by way of North Africa, and joined the Free French. By the end of the war ...”

“... one of the MPs who has taken the topic up at Parliamentary level is an antiabortion campaigner, David Alton. The stories the Romans told about the Christians have often been attributed to misunderstandings about theology, specifically, about the nature of the Eucharist. But Christian imagery, divorced from its conventional context, is startling: Abraham and ...”

“... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...”