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“... does not think the so-called defenders should have allowed him. However he manages to save the ball and throws it back into play, shaking his head and saying, as a reproof to his own team, ‘’Ave a word, ’ave a word.’ I take this to mean ‘Pull your socks up’ or as they would say in Yorkshire, ‘Frame yourselves.’Having espoused the attitudes ...”

“... the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund managers, Marshall casts himself as a disruptive outsider. Even those who say they know him well describe him as detached, almost inscrutable. But almost all agree that his worldview has ...”

“... Republic with its cynical and fluctuating anti-Americanism didn’t have long to run in fact, but George Marchais and Jacques Duclos and the others weren’t to know that, any more than they did when they became the ‘party of order’ once more and supported the ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia a few months later. Somewhere between those two ...”

“... doing more for themselves. The ‘most important anti-crime programme ever known is a dad playing ball with his son’. Of course his vision for the state would mean great effort, even sacrifice, but weren’t they up to the challenge? The West was won in Missouri. The first mile of the Interstate was laid in Missouri. In Missouri they built steamships ...”

“... that there are now ‘eating dogs for the anorexic’. In the background, of course, lay the fluff-ball Jacobinism of September 1997 which surfaced in the media after Diana’s tryst with the underpass. It was rightly observed that the blood Royals inhabited an emotional tundra, where feeling was subjugated to ‘duty’ and ‘the Firm’. By contrast, Diana ...”

“... The Royal Ballet production brings out the witty nature of the piece: a man chases a tennis-ball into a garden and gets drawn into a lusty, tangled dance with two women. It was the first ballet ever danced in modern dress. The Royal Ballet’s performers play the whole thing intelligently: they follow the spirit of Nijinsky’s Modernism without turning ...”

“... efforts to get her to dance with him, finally claims her as his partner. At the Netherfield ball our heroine has had to endure two clumsy turns of the floor with Mr Collins, before enjoying a dance with an unnamed officer who has conversed happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when ...”

“... a war on evil sounds, if anything, yet more quixotic than that other jihad waged on abstraction, George W. Bush’s war against terror. The trouble with a war on evil is that it has an air of pragmatic contradiction. Making war to end war-making may, as the just war tradition shows, manage to shrug off this air. But what about doing evil, in order to stop ...”

“... children. Wealthy, intelligent and good looking, she made her debut at the age of 18 at a ball in Carlisle where, family tradition had it, she was the belle of the evening. A drawing of her some years later shows an intelligent, conventionally pretty face, the hair piled up behind a centre parting, large eyes, small chin, a nose sharpening into middle ...”

“... week’s visit to Newstead Abbey, his Nottinghamshire home, with Hobhouse and his cousin and heir, George Byron. Even when he was there, Caroline Lamb could not leave him alone. A page arrived with a letter from her; Hobhouse suspected the boy, who had a ‘dreadful body’, to be Caroline herself – she was fond of performing a similar trick in London. If it ...”

“... Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk … her legs apart, and she was covered in excrement, sperm and blood … in her mouth was a penis, cut with a machete, that of her father … nearby in a ditch with stinking water were four bodies, cut up, piled up, their parents and older brothers ...”

“... account. By the end of the 1964-70 Wilson Administration, everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up ...”

“... of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; the New York Times routinely portrays it not as Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but as his Ship of Fools (Schwarzenegger’s election as governor has deeply gratified the rest of the nation, which can now reflect even ...”

“... who sit on thrones or send armies into battle. Reagan’s War on Drugs, as total a failure as George W. Bush’s War on Terror, may indirectly have led to almost as many deaths – by destabilising Colombia, for example. It would be hard to think of any organised crime outfit responsible for a fraction of those two butcher’s-bills, in spite of all the ...”

“... In his​ 1917 guide to diplomatic practice, Ernest Satow described a court ball held in London in 1768 at which a dispute over seating placements in the diplomatic box resulted in a duel between the Russian and French ambassadors. (The Russian ambassador came off worse, but survived.) The life of a diplomat is no longer assumed to feature the smell of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour ...”