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“... Fine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests ...”

“... In 1857, eight years before Kipling was born, Indian soldiers in the north of the country rebelled against the representatives of the East India Company. The uprising was known as the Sepoy Mutiny and, later, somewhat romantically, as the First War of Independence ...”

“... The first part of Jeremy Harding’s piece on Sharia finance can be read here.The rules that govern Islamic banking and finance are non-negotiable, cast in tradition, as good as stone. A finance house that sticks to the plot will not come to grief in a credit crisis; neither will its clients ...”

“... This is the story of simple working people – their hardships, their humours, but above all their heroism.’ The epigraph which introduced the 1939 screen version of The Stars Look Down – the words are possibly those of A.J. Cronin, the novelist, rather than of Carol Reed, the film’s director – signalled a remarkable turn-around in attitudes to the miners, as well as prefiguring what was to be the leading idiom of British wartime cinema ...”

“... You set out believing in a world of possible truths; you finish up in an eternity of corridors waiting for clarification. Sometimes the only truth you find is the truth of your own hunger to find. You see in a flash that nothing will come of further questions or second trips ...”

“... informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks ...”

“... presidential election in March, though whether the drama was a near tragedy, as followers of the victor believe, or a comedy, as his opponents maintain, was not immediately clear. The island is politically divided into two colour-coded blocs, along Byzantine lines. On one side is ...”

“... First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial ...”

“... 2 January. Catching up on the literary round-ups at the year’s end I’m struck as so often by how cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally ...”

“... Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E ...”

“... Sovereignty: supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority, or rule. OED Without conflicting mental reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour ...”

“... Agency in mid-town Alexandria has an eerily compelling window display: a shrine to the memory of Dodi al-Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales. The shrine has as its centrepiece the front cover of the magazine al-Musawwar depicting Di and Dodi on their ...”

“... Are​ there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages ...”

“... When​ King Hassan II of Morocco was crowned in 1961, he had already made influential friends. In 1943, as the son of Sultan Mohammed ben Yusef, he had been introduced to Roosevelt and Churchill at the Anfa Conference in Casablanca; in 1945, aged fifteen, he was decorated by de Gaulle ...”