“... India and China – stepped up their purchases. By August, Russia was making up to $800 million a day from oil and gas, muffling the impact of Western sanctions. Yet while in the short term the surge in oil prices has benefited Russia, in the long run its prospects as an energy exporter look less solid. Last year, the EU imported 40 per cent of its natural ...”

“... a hotel, to the great annoyance of the management.’ They travel to Normandy to see where Keith Douglas was shelled as he stood beside his tank. They prowl around Roundhay Park in Leeds, where John Riley was mugged and beaten to death in the wee hours after drinking at a pub. They also go to predictable and even boring places: Wallace Stevens’s house (he ...”

“... mating call (which can be heard at http://www.bigjude.com/Page8.html) was compared by the late Douglas Adams to the opening bars of a Pink Floyd album, is unique among parrots in having a mating system in which females choose between males gathered together on a common display ground. Now that only fifty wild individuals are left in scattered locations in ...”

“... contributions to the development of Azerbaijan and the entire region’. The previous day, Ilham Aliyev had seized the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning assault, expelling more than 100,000 Armenians from their homes. Azerbaijani forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings in the region.This wasn’t the first time BP had ...”

“... up. In 1912 she was sent down from the college for planning an illicit excursion to Epsom on Derby Day. Her Aunt Ada whisked her off on a tour of the Continent, evidently hoping to distract her from her liaisons dangereuses. She returned to study at the LSE, graduated in 1914, and went to work briefly for a social agency in the East End. In mid-July 1916, she ...”

“... Group, which served the informational needs of Eurosceptic MPs, he met another recent graduate, Douglas Carswell, and convinced him to join the cause. The three young men – born in 1970 or 1971 – had certain similarities in their personal histories. Hannan and Carswell spent their childhoods in faraway, politically disturbed countries as the children of ...”

“... But then Maitland inherited an earldom, and his lordship was evidently on the line on the first day of his neighbour’s succession with the amiable cry, ‘Good morning, Patrick.’ Having also courted Junor when he was a government minister ‘needing the occasional spot of help and understanding’, Carrington leaves the editor amazed that he should ...”

“... complex of military aerospace plants in the nation: Hughes, Lockheed, Northrop, TRW, McDonnell Douglas; here until a few years ago was a powerful manufacturing base with car and tire plants and, to the east in Fontana, the only integrated steel plant on the Pacific slope. Here are strange sub-cities like Vernon, a separately incorporated industrial ...”

“... from Apuleius in Latin fails to slake his fires and a song or two on the guitar fans them. ‘Some day some man will kill you, I suppose,’ cries Paul, ‘but I shall be your lover first.’ At this the temptress affects bewildered surprise, ‘as a child might do who sets light to a whole box of matches in play. What a naughty, naughty toy to burn so ...”

“... the sentiments here are too easy; in ‘Description’, he writes: ‘I love the language/of the day’s ten thousand aspects.’ In ‘At the Boatyard’: What I love at the boatyard, at the end of Good Templar Place, is the scraped, accidental intensity of colour. In ‘To the Storm God’: ‘I love the wet ideograms/scrawling the houseboat.’ In ...”

“... the room I used to work in And from time to time You look up to see if I am watching you. To this day Your arms are full of the wild flowers You were most in love with. As often with Hamilton, the poem works as much by what it doesn’t say as what it does: the happiness it commemorates is no longer present for the participants, or so we assume from the ...”

“... his eloquence, wit and rakishness; he had figured in the greatest civil trial of his times, the ‘Douglas Cause’ over the rightful inheritance of one of Scotland’s most powerful dynasties. But there remained something amateurish about his approach to the law. Boswell worked hard enough on his briefs, but, as his colleagues felt, he took everything too ...”

“... himself, with an eye to party politics, recruited able young socialists like Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. The diaries reveal the many points of conflict between the career Civil Service and the outsiders. There were quarrels about honours: were the temporaries entitled to them? And there were differences over policy. One of Dalton’s pet ideas at the ...”

“... a stunning cobalt-blue wool trapeze, with white open-backed heels and a false chignon. That very day, if memory serves, he had sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed ...”

“... the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every used and lost and eroded object of desire. DeLillo doesn’t always use such grave cadences, and his early novels have a lot of fun channelling the voices of half-crazed people who are themselves attempting to channel the animating spirits of ...”