“... it’s also the look in the eye of the man throwing up his hands before being shot in The Third of May. Find no one to hand with whom I can quite share this (probably mistaken) perception so come away. 22 February. Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of public libraries. His ...”

“... chief superintendent of the Belgian police, are increasingly popular among European states. They may find it hard to agree about much when it comes to their own continent, but on North African territory intra-EU co-operation is all the rage. Last year the Italian parliament voted to divert a battalion from the Middle East to Niger; Germany has sent a ...”

“... shrewd,’ warns a certain Dr Johnson. ‘Be not deceiv’d by any level of the Exotick they may present you, Kilts, Bag-Pipes sort of thing. Haggis. You must keep eternal Vigilance.’ Mason considers himself warned.But what actually happens in it? Well. Dixon is a rollicking country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s ...”

“... only a language as outdated as Fanon’s will do.Impeccable Frenchman though he may have been, the French were never prepared to take Fanon seriously. An Antillais, a psychiatre not a psychanalyste, a non-philosopher in thrall to a simplified existentialism, an alien unable to sympathise with the double bind of Algérie française. (‘The ...”

“... Quinn and her parents – father a long-distance lorry driver, mother a worker at the Bryant & May match factory – had rented the downstairs floor of a private terraced house in Usher Road, Bow, a land of cobblestones, cigarette smoke, crowded pubs and crowded bedrooms, backyard privies and tin baths filled with water heated on the range. Usher Road was ...”

“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched by more than ...”

“... systematic coverage of either the more or the less academic literature where our recommendations may have been discussed. The system of criminal justice, by which I understand not only the procedures for dealing with suspects, defendants, and appellants, but also the principles on which those procedures rest, is a topic on which feelings can and often do run ...”

“... 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date as His Majesty may by Order in Council declare to be the date on which the emergency that was the occasion of the passing of this Act came to an end, and shall then expire’. The Act gave the executive wide powers to regulate exports without any Parliamentary oversight, and ...”

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

“... be forced to do it in order to maintain anything like their current standards of living. Who, you may well ask, are the Americans to tell us how to pump gas or distribute welfare? Friedman does nothing to make himself more amiable; he is the kind of journalist who likes to tell you not only that he meets the top people, but that he parades his ego before ...”

“... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...”

“... pace until after the Second World War. Some of the desperation that fuelled his early writings may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another ...”

“... very next chapter Marjorie rewards him from beyond the grave with £5000 and the Alfa. Try as he may, Benson can’t avoid falling for Greg as easily as Sadie; nor can he avoid making Marjorie into something a good deal worse than an old bat, a PLOP, or Plucky Old Person. Reading about her past, you realise she was doomed to become one; it is a past filled ...”

“... was done even now. Oliver Tambo corresponded from London. Someone from England – maybe it was David Astor, he was a friend – sent him the Observer. And he had lots of American friends, especially Martin Luther King. It was a terrible thing for us when Martin was killed. Father had a whole collection of Martin’s speeches on tape and he used to play ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”