“... 1918, it was Stavisky. For the Fourth Republic, it was the affaire des fuites, when details of Cabinet meetings and security measures were leaked to the Viet-Minh and their Communist allies during the war in Indo-china. For de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, it was the kidnapping and presumed murder of Ben Barka. For his short-lived successor, Pompidou, it was ...”

“... before being recalled by her father in 1940 because of the war. Until she was 40 she dwelt in his shadow, observing a noble and irresolute mind which clung to stronger wills for support and which felt ultimately betrayed by their death or by his faulty judgment of their character. His vital props failed him gradually one by one: first his father, then ...”

“... had for the crimes of the Nazis. The TRC was essentially a special court, convened in the shadow of apartheid law, whose work did not address the legalised exclusion, oppression and exploitation of a racialised majority. In his foreword to the TRC’s five-volume final report, published in 1998, Desmond Tutu celebrated the commission as evidence of ...”

“... of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been otherwise, Cameron might not have become leader. Yet he has been perceived as an unstoppable force, the author of an irreversible transformation ...”

“... to be stopped in Spain too. In another monologue, this one three hours long and addressed to his cabinet in December 1936, he declared that Europe was now divided into two hostile camps. Spain was the theatre in which communism had to be defeated. ‘If there had not been the danger of the Red Peril overwhelming Europe,’ he said in one of his private ...”

“... 1915-16, could also be seen as basically unsoldierly, involving as it did his resignation from the cabinet – surely a dereliction of his real war duty. His excuse was that he wanted some fun. It was, however, an unusual thing to do. As D’Este points out, ‘politicians who start wars rarely experience the results of their actions.’ D’Este praises him ...”

“... of the repressed’: the repressed, that is, of the Franco-Algerian war, which can still cast a shadow over a presidential campaign decades after the FLN took to the gun.New and shiny, Macron hopes to lay this difficulty to rest. It is more than sixty years since the Algerian war began and the time is right, even if no one is willing to take the step: shame ...”

“... annihilation ... I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life. The autobiographical ...”

“... doubt if one can account for the qualitative difference by the superiority of the Winslow cocktail cabinet. For one thing, the hooch is illegal. For another, in all probability Lowell invented the drink with a ‘cavalier indifference to fact’. The aural shortcomings here are not an isolated instance in his work and bother even his admirers. For John ...”

“... ago, has become the peroxide icon of this unnatural species, the monster who, as in a medical cabinet, is held up as the aberration that defines, by inversion and excess, the lineaments of normality. Her stare strikes the beholder as stony, the eyes demonically intent, the mouth hard and cruel. This is the very picture of the Stranger to whom children ...”

“... it, offering up Renaissance England for the bedazzlement of American graduate students as itself a cabinet of wonderful curiosities. Both these studies acknowledge the direct influence of Greenblatt: Bishop, admittedly, expresses some reservations (‘making large claims for some crucial transition in the “history of subjectivity” on the basis of a poem or ...”

“... a spade from the lean-to and put it in the back, then went into the house, unlocked the gun cabinet between the kitchen and the stairs and carried the shotgun out to the pick-up too. Jack and Tom were both in the yard at the time, but felt from the way their father was looking and moving that they shouldn’t speak. Then Michael went into the kitchen ...”

“... after the revolt. Mubarak’s last interior minister was tried in court as a member of Mubarak’s cabinet rather than as a member of the security service, and imprisoned for failing to protect demonstrators rather than for killing them. Officers close to retirement age were pensioned off with full benefits; minor reshuffles were carried out here and ...”

“... discussions, and before we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was ...”

“... no doubt knew, Howard was picking up on a speech made a few weeks earlier by Tim Collins, his shadow education secretary, to the National Catholic Heads’ Conference. In a zealous attack on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, the only school subject Collins had discussed at any length was history: ‘The problems surrounding it,’ he ...”