“... randomly taken, and mocked by grandiloquent chapter titles (‘A Star is Born’, ‘Mighty Like a Rose’). The sequence records her birth inter faeces (her mother has taken an ill-timed overdose of salts); her ungrateful father, desperate for a ‘laddie’, names her after the passing milkman’s horse; the narrative jumps seven years to the heroine’s ...”

“... This was widely understood to be a solemn and significant national event, but when Howard rose to speak, he wagged a finger at the audience and hectored them on the virtues of his amendments to the Native Title Act. A number of black Australians rose and turned their backs. Meanwhile, the long-running enquiry into ...”

“... worth £1.64 on the day of sale. The average value of the shares of the two generating companies rose by 171 per cent between 1991 and 1995; the shares of the RECs rose by 200 per cent in the same period, while the average gain to shareholders of those RECs taken over by another company has been 356 per cent. Fat-cat ...”

“... in his life, from his comfortable student days in turn-of-the-century Vienna, to his grand tour of France and Germany, and then England, where he stayed for more than a year. Indeed, in 1907, when he was 24, he actually married an Englishwoman some 12 years older than he was, and took the intrepid Gladys off to Egypt, though he subsequently – and rather ...”

“... global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America – Europe is back!’ In France, Marcel Gauchet, theorist of democracy and an editor of Le Débat, the country’s central journal of ideas, explains, more demurely, that ‘we may be allowed to think that the formula the Europeans have pioneered is destined eventually to serve as a ...”

“... matter of plain old class rage: a put-upon servant who’s had enough of a tyrannical mistress. In France in 1933 the notorious Papin sisters – real-life models for the homicidal domestics in Genet’s The Maids – disembowelled their bourgeois mistress and her daughter in a fit of bestial frenzy after the unfortunate Mme Lancelin complained once too often ...”

“... the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s ...”

“... been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a ...”

“... Of European nations, she always favoured the French over the British. But the East topped even France. Her admiration for Arab cultures, especially Bedouin, Sufi and Druze, was genuine, not I think Orientalist in the Saidian sense of the word, or incipiently imperialist. Indeed, she came to see the East as a source of purification for the ...”

“... not, as historians have tended to portray it, an uninspiring moment for feminism. Suffragists in France, with support from elsewhere, demanded that the Paris Peace Conference involve women in the negotiations and that participating countries commit to the principle of women’s suffrage. Wilson received their delegations but had little interest in their ...”

“... hinterlands (the US, Russia) could rely on internal markets; some Continental states (Germany, France) sought for strategic or political reasons to shelter their agricultural sectors. Britain chose to outsource production, in the process creating a networked global economy of food. Take meat. Even in the early 19th century Britons ate more meat – 75 ...”

“... invasions by her neighbours. She succeeded admirably at the former, but less well at the latter. France, Prussia and Bavaria saw her accession as an opportunity to challenge Habsburg power. Frederick of Prussia took advantage of her uncertain position by annexing much of prosperous Silesia. Charles Albert of Bavaria invaded the kingdom of Bohemia and became ...”

“... the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar, Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, but if Osborne shows any American influence it is from the earlier generation of O’Neill, or even Odets. There were intermittently fine productions on the London stage: ‘revivals’ of classics at the Old Vic, and under the not always benign ...”

“... I have got lots of French books because I am an artist who loves Surrealism, which flourished in France. Mostly I look at the pictures, though I have read quite a few in translation. Imagine my shock when I read in the 20 March issue of the London Review, in Edmund Leach’s review of Lévi-Strauss’s latest, The View from Afar, that ‘the essay on Max ...”

“... On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face; he glowed like an avenger ... There was no prey that night. At 3.46 Prosser set course for base. He ...”