“... his hand. ‘Is it OK to have this?’ Over the logo of his laptop he had pasted a sticker of the rose window in Notre-Dame. The woman looked at him. ‘We’re not that crazy.’The journey to the lycée from my apartment in central Paris took about an hour: the last mile, by bus from the railway station, seemed to take as long as the first ten. I never knew ...”

“... trying to say something to the executioner. As the last shot was fired, the terrible, savage cry rose again from the crowd. Mothers with babies rushed forward to look on the bodies at close range, and small boys ran from one to the other spitting upon the bodies. The crowd dispersed, men and women laughing and shouting at one another. Barbarous? Such events ...”

“... Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain standing in a cattle pond a little way to the north. When I arrived at Essex ten years ago to teach in the department of ...”

“... in lesser developments that would eventually fuel friction and fury in a car-saturated land. In Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train (1926), cited in the OED’s entry on Metroland, a flighty sounding couple who have chosen to settle among ‘nice people’ in Great Missenden protest that ‘they must have a car, though,’ as ‘relying entirely on the Met is too ...”

“... her little ones … the untameable jealous tiger that urinates on international conventions to mark his territory.’ Not long afterwards we find him stumbling through a field as his jubilant enemies close in. The Dictator’s Last Night is the latest addition to a line of fiction – the dictator novel – that has its origins in 19th-century ...”

“... lithographs and woodcuts for their impact and circulation, while in the 1930s, as the Nazis rose to power and her opportunities for exhibition and publication were curtailed, she resorted to sculpture. (The first woman to be appointed as professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1919, she was forced to resign in 1933, a timespan that matches the ...”

“... Mark out, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which no movement is allowed and you have one of the key themes of history. Draw a closed line preventing movement from outside to inside the line, and you define landed property. Draw the same line preventing movement from inside the line to outside, and you define compulsory confinement ...”

“... brook, these are God’s trees and these are God’s sheep and lambs.’ ‘Then why don’t you mark them with a big G?’ Linnell asked. He instructed Palmer to ‘look hard, long and continually’, and to emulate Dürer and Van Leyden, advice that was evidently difficult to reconcile with the militant anti-naturalism he was getting from Blake. In high ...”

“... intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote. At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of ...”

“... work: ‘If he hired a housekeeper, national income went up, economic growth increased, employment rose and unemployment fell. If he subsequently married her, and she continued to do precisely the same activities, national income and growth went down, employment fell and unemployment rose. This is absurd (and sexist).’ The ...”

“... the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of ...”

“... by a 170-page introduction, was published in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1967 that he made his mark. That year he published three books of astonishing audacity which, taken together, amounted to a declaration of war on structuralism, then all the rage in France: Speech and Phenomena, another study of Husserl; Writing and Difference, a collection of essays ...”

“... the hatch-way: ‘Below there ...’ That veteran courtier Tommy Lascelles was probably nearer the mark in once observing almost to himself: ‘Rupert’s more like a Life Guards officer than a publisher.’ The firm, if not run single-handed, was not far from that, and, if Hart-Davis himself did not normally undertake the packaging of the books, I should by ...”

“... single word:And catch, the single little flat word among these monsters, names an action; it is a mark of human inadequacy to deal with these matters of statecraft, a child snatching at the moon as she rides thunderclouds. The meanings cannot all be remembered at once, however often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and ...”

“... that began inside the Tory Party during the 1990s. In response to the Maastricht Treaty, he and Mark Reckless, another Oxford student, founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain; soon after, as the salaried director of the European Research Group, which served the informational needs of Eurosceptic MPs, he met another recent graduate, Douglas ...”