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“... of price, price, price. Most company mottoes and advertising slogans are bullshit. Wal-Mart means what it says: ‘Always low prices’ – a slogan which on some of its stores now simply appears as ‘Always’, in the knowledge that its customers can be trusted to complete the thought. The first Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, its ...”

“... wasn’t sure that I would have the physical and emotional stamina – or indeed the means – to keep on with the project.’ It was only with volume six, The Stolen Light, that he became confident of his ‘architecture’ and gave the set the general title he had ‘carried so long in my head’. Mehta’s afterword doesn’t touch on this ...”

“... II to concede a constitution. ‘Clearly foreshortened and written in haste,’ is the verdict of David McLellan, the editor of the 1998 World’s Classics edition of the Manifesto, to which Attali adds only that he doesn’t see how the authors had time even to reread the thing, never mind rewrite it more carefully. By the time it appeared in mid-February ...”

“... on one of the Saturday-night talent shows that have changed young Britons’ notions of what it means to be alive.) And yet, despite the millions, the gear, the house in Hollywood, her story happens not to be an account of all the luck and the fun she is having. It would take a whole book on its own to really explain the recovery process I have been ...”

“... Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be ...”

“... Commune up to 1968 displayed ‘the pacification of political manners’, or ‘civil war by other means’. Then came the first ‘modern revolution’ – modern in the sense that ‘it did not aim at taking power.’ And since? In Hazan’s view, a long period of calm, with the city ‘stuck in the continuum of the Bergsonian time of domination and ...”

“... of power in Hungary and Bulgaria.’ If there was a civil war in Poland, I missed it – unless he means the declaration of martial law in 1981. Neither did the ‘mass mobilisations’ and protests of 1989 feel like old-fashioned class war. Which classes? The label might just stick if it were written in neo-Marxist terms: the struggle between a ‘New ...”

“... jokes and puns, and farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the view gets more weird. If you have a biological sibling, you share at least one parent, which means you are both likely to have large chunks of DNA from that parent in your own genome. With a more distant relative, like a fourth cousin, you have to go further back in the family tree to find a common ancestor – a great-great-great-grandparent. Over the ...”

“... it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the model of the Liberal Unionists after ...”

“... and poured from chutes into the holds of the world’s largest fishing fleet, queuing up for the means to chill their catch before heading for northern waters. When the ships came back they’d bury the quayside in haddock and cod. There were six hundred trawlers in Grimsby in the boom years of the mid-20th century, and each good-sized deep sea vessel had ...”

“... of a Palestinian homeland since, despite the commitments, muffled as they are, of the Camp David accords, no such idea has as yet managed to find an enabling vocabulary within what is considered “reasonable” political discourse in this country.’ What needs to be added to Poirier’s astute comments is that the ‘idea’ of a Palestinian homeland ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... known as Amal (both an acronym that stands for Detachments of Lebanese Resistance and a noun that means ‘hope’). Another was the rapid ascendancy of two Shia religious leaders, who, like al-Sadr, studied in the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. The decisive factor in the shift from Hope ...”