“... and pliant imperial officials, he ensured they were invested in his success. Worried that Home Rule for Ireland might unravel the British Empire, he paid Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rulers ten thousand pounds in cash to guarantee they would support the principle of Irish ...”

“... Many have even generated their own nickname: the Maracanazo (Brazil’s catastrophic defeat at home in 1950 to Uruguay in the Maracanã stadium); the Battle of Bern (the notorious 1954 quarter-final between Hungary and Brazil, with three players sent off and fighting continuing in the dressing rooms); the Battle of Santiago (hosts Chile against Italy in ...”

“... prices: as high as the equivalent of $10 a piece, a large proportion of their monthly take home pay. The cakes found their way onto the black market in Pyongyang; corrupt soldiers in Kaesong, who routinely exacted ‘fines’ from the South Korean managers, began to accept, and sometimes require, payment in chocolate and marshmallow. By some ...”

“... every impulse of peasant culture, drove him away from the farmyard across the dank pastures of Northern France and Belgium, and a few years later, down through Italy, racking up great distances in the course of a day. Rimbaud was of course more of a provincial bourgeois than a peasant. Yet the nomadic disposition of the boy who hiked to the threshold of ...”

“... without intermission by the realities of financial dependency on Washington, austerity at home and imperial retreat abroad. By the time consumer prosperity arrived, a decade later, the country was already lagging behind the growth of Continental economies, and within a few more years found itself locked out of a European Community whose construction ...”

“... could not be given too much importance: its purpose was to help us feel better about ourselves at home, not to hinder our management of unruly natives. Just as ‘air cover’ had no clear legal base, so the use of force to destroy the will of opponents was without legal justification. Yet it was often used and usually worked: a few early and apparently ...”

“... officials, judges and police brought them notoriety. Their magnifico habits gave them a limited home-town popularity, consistently exaggerated by foreign journalists. They bought land, cattle, urban property, football teams, and some politicians, judges, policemen and soldiers. Society was at first amused, particularly by their zoological gardens. It was ...”

“... 1953. The Queen, Arthur Bryant rhapsodised, was the foundation of British society; Churchill, in office once again, had greeted her father’s death the previous year with the words: ‘We stand erect both as an island people and as the centre of a worldwide Commonwealth and Empire.’ Weight has to hang on until the 1960s ...”

“... Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon – resulting in documents of such ‘epic length’ that the Ireland’s EU commissioner declared of the last that ‘no sane and sensible person’ could read it, after his prime minister admitted, after signing it, he had not done so: they amount, in effect, to enormous cryptograms beyond the patience or grasp of any ...”

“... Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations that impose on universities and student unions a new duty to ‘secure freedom of speech within the law’ for academics, students, staff and ...”

“... But it delivers a basic truth. Foreign conquerors were no novelty in the subcontinent, whose northern plains had known successive waves of invaders from the tenth century onwards. For many, the British were not necessarily more alien than previous rulers. The latest invaders would, of course, always require their own soldiers too. But if the British ...”

“... for an education authority to sack married women teachers on the ground that their duties lay at home or, in 1948, that it was perfectly all right for Wednesbury Corporation to use its cinema licensing powers to stop young people going to the pictures on Sundays? Not one of these decisions, each of them affecting what we would recognise now as fundamental ...”

“... school and a Sure Start centre, before a visit to a struggling steel business. On the journey home, he gets embroiled in an email exchange with one of his advisers on the never-ending challenge of trying to nail down the peace in Northern Ireland. He also feels he has to respond to an email from Joanna ...”

“... declining to answer may legitimately lead to the drawing of adverse inferences in court. Recent Home Office research indicates that the proportion of suspects refusing to answer questions has fallen since the 1994 enactment from 23 per cent to 16 per cent, but that the proportion making incriminating admissions has ...”

“... and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met . . . When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year . . . I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill ...”