“... Act 2003, which introduced the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, which came into force on 1 May 2005. These contain a mandatory regulation: ‘Every building must be designed and constructed in such a way that in the event of an outbreak of fire within the building, or from an external source, the spread of fire on the external walls of the building is ...”

“... her hands as she tries to enter into a conversation among Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Christine Lagarde, who grimaces. It is reported that a ‘friendship tree’, given months earlier by Macron to Trump and ceremoniously planted by both on the White House lawn as a symbol of the ties that bind France and the US, immediately died.*Before ...”

“... Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of America edition that Roth went apoplectic in a barrage of faxes that must have had little lightning bolts ...”

“... of British agriculture today. The worst has not been and gone. It is yet to come. Still, one thing may already be clear: British farming hanged itself on the expectation of plenty.One day not long ago I was in the Sainsbury’s superstore on the Cromwell Road. Three of the company’s top brass ushered me down the aisles, pointing here, gasping there, each of ...”

“... rich, and spend the revenue for the common good. But as Hobsbawm tells us, while the noble bandit may be generous and chivalrous, he’s a lousy socialist: Insofar as bandits have a ‘programme’, it is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in ...”

“... highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was instructed not to drain the treasury with an unnecessary adventure. But he was ambitious for rank and title, and so found an excuse: King Vikrama, he claimed, had committed acts of barbarism against local ...”

“... short of this last reservation, but the Sustainable Development Commission insists that markets may look very different in future and we shouldn’t assume that our strong ‘financial and service sectors’ will enable us to access food from around the world indefinitely. Better to arrest the decline of British farming: the carnival of food awareness in ...”

“... us than that of diversitvy, which epitomises for us a long past of misfortune and abjection?’ It may be less the fact than the cult of regional diversity that tells us something Specific about the history of France.There is a second claim for French specificity in Braudel’s account, less prominent or pursued, but comparable in kind. Turning from geography ...”

“... of $445 billion.Zuckerberg’s news about Facebook’s size came with an announcement which may or may not prove to be significant. He said that the company was changing its ‘mission statement’, its version of the canting pieties beloved of corporate America. Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world ...”

“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... promiscuous gays and Haitians. Six months later, there were two more cases in haemophiliacs. In May 1983, a heterosexual woman got Aids from a transfusion of whole blood whose donor turned out to be a gay man (although not one who was ‘homosexually active with numerous contacts’) who later developed Aids. As I said earlier, Starr suggests that, as Aids ...”

“... like he comes from another world. That isn’t his fault – he does. But it suggests that he may have overstated the extent to which he could stand in for America. Moreover, he shares the tendency of his high-IQ tribe to let his own side off the hook when he wants to. He acknowledges that however well he understood the principles of workplace ...”

“... Depestre; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; the French poet Louis Aragon; the French photographer Robert Doisneau; the Russian-Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov and his father, Victor Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the early 1970s and ‘Guns for ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... during the First World War to remove toxic elements from the body after gas attacks. In 2005 Robert Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer, published an article entitled ‘Deadly Immunity’, which posited a vast conspiracy between government officials and pharmaceutical companies to cover up the link between mercury and autism. The article was found to be ...”