“... the town of Sandwich. One evening in early summer, before Farage had confirmed he would run, I took the train from London to Ramsgate, where a local secondary school, the Ellington and Hereson, was staging a version of Question Time, with the Ukip leader on the panel. The high-speed train from London, which has been running since 2009, is a 21st-century ...”

“... this one on standby, just waiting for the occasion. By chance the party conference in Bournemouth took place a few days before the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, convened to discuss ways of limiting their respective nuclear arsenals. Thatcher used the promise of this event to drive her message home. Reagan, she insisted, could negotiate ...”

“... us together and we were both flattered by it:James JamesMorrison MorrisonWeatherby George Dupree,Took great care of his mother,Though he was only three.But it was my father who really took great care of her. ‘Come on dear, now don’t get worked up,’ was the usual gentle warning, or more stiffly if he thought he was ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... Mary, which had been requisitioned as a troop-ship, and they were reunited, my 42-year-old father took her – perhaps as a present for her 23rd birthday – to be fitted for a pair of shoes at Peal & Co, a family firm famous for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was ...”

“... by its neighbours, when it was ceded by Madrid in 1975 to Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco took a good and profitable slice of the north – phosphates were the main economic enticement – and Mauritania, the poorer neighbour abutting the south, took the rest. Spanish Sahara, in other words, was never properly ...”

“... near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September 1968, a month before Crossman took up his new portfolio. The Ministry had by then spent six months arguing that Howe’s explosive eighty thousand words should remain confidential; only a brief summary would be published. ‘Not on your life,’ Howe had said, according to Crossman’s ...”

“... by showing that Genet was attracted almost exclusively to heterosexual men. In the Seventies he took almost no interest in gay liberation, which he no doubt perceived as a white, middle-class movement, a matter of French domestic politics, at a time when his sole commitment was to the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. To add the final insult, he insisted ...”

“... involved there in the first place. The military supply flights that Kouchner and his co-workers took from Gabon to Biafra often carried arms: their mission was less neutral than it appeared. The conflict might have felt genocidal to its victims, but it would more accurately be seen as a particularly brutal civil war. As Péan views it, the ‘Biafran ...”

“... conditions that Zweig – who had recently moved to Salzburg – be rigorously excluded. (Zweig took to absenting himself from Salzburg every summer while the festival was on.) Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian put himself through a Zweig novella (that same Confusion I mentioned earlier) ‘reluctantly, a spoonful a day, like a nasty-tasting ...”

“... where he stowed them behind some bins. News International security guards retrieved them and took them to Wapping while detectives searched the flat. The security guards then returned the bags to the car park, stashing them behind the bins along with a pizza. One of the guards, borrowing from Where Eagles Dare, texted his colleague: ‘Broadsword to ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... and a largely Kurdish part where the YPG is strong. When IS attacked the Arab district the US took no action. But as soon as IS moved to attack the Kurdish districts, US air raids were launched. Many analysts saw this strategy as flawed. They argued that IS should be seen as the greater evil, and that Assad’s forces should be assisted if that was what ...”

“... of delusion that prevents the masses from rising up in revolution. All were raised in what they took to be gilded cages in a hostile society; in his essay ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Benjamin described the Jews in his neighbourhood as living ‘in a posture compounded of self-satisfaction and resentment that turned it into something like a ghetto held on ...”

“... British imperial experience. He didn’t need to mount a conscious defence of empire; he took it for granted. When he graduated from Oxford in 1884 and sought political instruction, his cousin, a former viceroy of India, arranged for him to work for his second cousin, Evelyn Baring, consul-general of Egypt. Grey’s perspective was ...”