“... a view of St Paul’s Cathedral; after the 1987 storm, the council replaced them with blank steel shutters that close off the view from inside and, from outside, echo the bleak appearance of a row of shuttered shops. The green bosses studding the façades of the towers were originally made of concrete faced with glass beads that glittered in the ...”

“... 12 June, the arrows indicated that the German army was twenty miles from Paris. (Not on the map, David and Wallis Windsor leaving France in a convoy of cars loaded with their luggage.) Harriet and Clarencesaw that the illuminations had been switched off in the Cismigiu. The park, where people walked in summer until all hours, was now silent and deserted, a ...”

“... for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when I see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or ...”

“... part they have renovated, replacing bricks with brightly coloured anodised aluminium and adding a steel spiral staircase, ‘I sense … the same enthusiasm and excitement that Jack Lynn and I enjoyed half a century ago.’ Smith ‘qualified at a privileged time’, he admits, when there was a ‘sense of optimism and a deep social concern’, the second of ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... into action wearing a cap modified to droop around his ears (he declined to wear a British-style steel helmet), a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a gas-mask and was twice lightly gassed, earning two of his 20 citations for wounds and ...”

“... is not immune to an infection of bad contemporary art, in this case robotic figures in polished steel scattered through the streets. Lunch, salade de chèvre chaud, at the café by the abbey is the same as we had when we were here twenty years ago, though with a difference. Then it came as a horizontal dish on a platter. Today the ingredients are the same ...”

“... question in Bonn: they wanted to bully Adenauer, an ardent Europhile, out of the European Coal and Steel Community, and to buy off his economic minister, Ludwig Erhard, a free-trade fundamentalist who sympathised with Britain. As a direct counter, Britain founded the European Free Trade Area, EFTA, a club of free-traders that now includes ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... is right to be aggrieved at Nato expansion. Talking points from Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, David Harvey, Bernie Sanders, Jack F. Matlock Jr et al are cited everywhere, along with Russian disinformation (the Russian TV station RT has a huge following on Weibo). Ukraine is often described as a failed state, its only hope of survival to accept its role as ...”

“... of what farming has meant in this country. Farming – more even than coal, more than ships, steel, or Posh and Becks – is at the centre of who British people think they are. It has a heady, long-standing, romantic and sworn place in the cultural imagination: the death of farming will not be an easy one in the green and pleasant land. Even ...”

“... By 1950, when Monnet was devising the Schuman Plan that yielded the initial European Coal and Steel Community, Hayek himself was in America, and played little part in shaping arguments for integration. Later, rejecting the idea of a single currency as statist (he favoured competing private issues), he would come to the conclusion that the Community itself ...”

“... put it – had to be given ‘a fair crack of the whip’. When the whip was cracked, it came steel-tipped. ‘A few riots in Ankara would do us nicely,’ an official in the Foreign Office had noted. In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed at a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... Hyacinth’s bookishness, his soul and his soft feeling, have been lured into the orbit of cold steel and hard strategy. The novel’s energy is released when these opposites cease to move against each other, or cease even to run in tandem, but merge, to become aspects of a single burning emotion.In a letter to his old Boston friend Grace Norton the year he ...”