“... Britain. Porsches, Jaguars and BMWs were the favourite cars on an island that measures nine miles by five. I took a job in a trust and company administration business, where I had to follow instructions faxed daily from banks and law firms across the world. This was a world of smoke and mirrors, in which a Jersey registered company might ...”

“... of the Jews murdered in Europe. This status won international recognition only gradually, thanks by and large to West Germany’s decision not only to pay compensation to the victims of Nazism but also to pay ‘reparations’ to the state of Israel. In her excellent book, Idith Zertal reviews some of the trials of Jewish collaborators who had immigrated to ...”

“... serial killer through a tunnel beneath Helsinki, Timo Harjunpää, the hero of The Priest of Evil by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, pulls out his gun and then pauses to consider the health and safety implications of what he’s doing. ‘He recalled that this communal tunnel was used for almost everything: water and drainage, heating, electricity, telephone ...”

“... Minister’s last couple of speeches that he has seriously lost his bearings. None of this should be a surprise: it was clear from the way Labour fought the last election that it would end up like this. The Government’s problem is that its operating assumptions and strategies are wholly or partly wrong; and it will have to emend them. The Government’s ...”

“... of treasonable design assumed life-and-death importance – the punishment for high treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. While other treason laws had come and gone, the 1351 statute remained the sole law defining high treason in England, and since the Act of Union it had also been the law in Scotland. The statute was generally agreed to ...”

“... Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which came of age between the two world wars and so (as the book’s subtitle claimed) ‘made postwar Britain’. Here he reflected on their social connections, their shifting political and intellectual priorities, their sexual preferences, and their apparently glittering careers ...”

“... shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England. Should the neighbours catch a glimpse of the Wealth of Nations sitting on the bookshelf alongside Thatcher’s memoirs or the latest Delia Smith, there’s no risk of ...”

“... in terms of Israel’s ‘mainstream’ culture, these characters are ‘others’. In the Hebrew, by contrast, the protagonists’ names (Danon, Rico, Albert, Bettine), the town of Bat Yam and the way all these are pronounced, sometimes even the wonderful language the characters use, signal this element of ethnicity very clearly. Why might Israeli readers ...”

“... individualised’ and ‘rarely, if ever, describe them’. What counts is the way they can be seen to derive from the horse’s pedigree. They form part of a language system, a new name showing a certain relation to that of the sire the horse is ‘by’ and perhaps the dam it is ‘out of’. The names, that is to ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”

“... unstable man returns from a mysterious stay in a Communist country to shoot the President-to-be with a rifle. It’s not surprising, then, that the film acquired its own myth – that it was too sensitive to be screened, at least until the late 1980s (in fact its disappearance had more to do with a falling out between ...”

“... Powell’s addresses in the Village – there were nine in all – and as I came across them one by one, I began to feel that, even though there was no way of knowing what they had been like when she had lived in them, these dwellings, which ranged from soigné to seedy, were a record of her changing fortunes, testifying to the occasional rewards, but ...”

“... of others and our relative well-being has nothing to do with colonialism or the IMF. Should you be told that the average life expectancy is 78.2 in Sweden and 39 in Sierra Leone, remind yourself that some cultures are cut out for success and others aren’t. Which culture you are born into is not something for which you are responsible. Neither are you ...”

“... had got going properly, ‘the autonomy of local government started to decline,’ Daunton says. By the interwar period, the institutional and social fabric that holds Britain’s cities together is fraying. New technologies of transport and power become slings for catapulting homes and industry clear of the tangled inner city. Reinforced ...”

“... landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years were blackened ...”