“... and axles, it required, with its crank-handle, the brawn of Hercules to make it start. The future lay with gasoline. In 1908, Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, priced at a level which Ford’s own $5-a-day workers could afford, gave oil-based fuel (of which America was then the world’s main producer) a commercial edge. In 1912, the electric starter and ...”

“... of the grotto built in the grounds of her château, to the humblest nuns, clerical assistants and lay disciples, whose relationships with the priests often had a sexual tinge. ‘Our Lord wants you more for himself every day,’ the head of the Assumptionists wrote to one of his female charges. ‘There are delicate things in your soul that he wishes to ...”

“... a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... to listen to such people.’ Not a very sensible thing for a self-styled elder statesman to say. Paul Scheffer, a left-wing columnist with political ambitions who became famous by taking a very public stance against multiculturalism, grew quite excited when Michael Ignatieff’s name came up in his conversation with Buruma. ‘You and I meet for the first ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... Bush’s more bellicose lieutenants saw it, the principal constraints on the use of American power lay within the US government itself. In a speech to Defense Department employees only a day before 9/11, Rumsfeld had warned of ‘an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America’. Who was this adversary? Some ...”

“... heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the time; on Friday there’s a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road. Most are second-hand. In the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, I used to walk around the district looking at books, often English classics once owned by ...”

“... Archer died with a heart more loyal to the fledgling Church of England in America than to Pope Paul V or the Virgin Mary. It’s even possible that his primary identity wasn’t religious, but that of an English adventurer and trusty servant of the king in Whitehall. Uniting these men in adversity, and for posterity, was their patriotic courage in ...”

“... of the postwar Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided. But behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most ...”

“... make little sense because he doesn’t give us so much as a hint of the coercive menace that lay behind them. For instance, he describes the Blair government’s response to the fuel blockade in 2000 as a victory for his principled position that ‘whatever we did had to be justifiable on wider policy grounds.’ He makes no mention of Blair’s threat ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes ...”

“... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...”

“... method?Her American followers didn’t appreciate that the roots of many of Montessori’s ideas lay in her religion. On Christmas Day 1939, she gave a speech in which she announced that ‘the fallen adult must look to the child for salvation.’ In Barcelona, her method was adopted as a Catholic system of education, championed by Father Antonio Casulleras ...”

“... Guardian (21 June) about the latest eruption in the Observer’s boardroom, Lonrho’s spokesman, Paul Spicer, was not concerned to confirm or deny the accuracy of the report: his only response was to warn that a search would be made to discover which of the directors had leaked the information and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of ...”