“... United States; and he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are ...”

“... order), Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the who what where why when remains unjournalistically unclear. It took DeWitt some time to reply, but when she did, the pair of them began an email correspondence. They are not, on the surface, compatible: he is a tabloid fixer and party animal, an imbiber and ingester; she is a solitary intellectual, weaving quietly at her ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources. As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but ...”

“... of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction. There’s a lot of boilerplate about starting from scratch and looking for a new identity, but few details of Sisyphean slog or Eureka! moments in among the shiny new electronic gear. Even a Kraftwerk sceptic like myself ...”

“... in the dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine ...”

“... to bring about was unprecedented: ‘This claim is upside down. The dangerous change actually took place in the early 1990s, when American policymakers effectively decided to let the rest of the world make our trade policy.’ This ‘crazy experiment’ was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... and discontents from Europe and North and South America – by the flame of Revolution.It took twenty-four hours to fly to Cuba from Europe in those days, the Iberia Viscount touching down on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin ...”

“... Early last year,​Jeremy Corbyn and his wife went to Newcastle and took the bus the short distance up the coast to Blyth in Northumberland, to see their old friend, the former Labour MP and miners’ leader Ronnie Campbell, who was gravely ill. It was a private visit by one left-wing insubordinate to another, by a campaigner who tried to re-radicalise Labour to one of his most loyal supporters ...”

“... bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig who acts a ...”

“... chance, should verbally embody a tiny chunk of his own name must have been a special treat. He took his camper van to Italy in 1926, where it was admired by the Pope and by Mussolini, both of whom accepted commemoratory photographs of this forward-looking contraption. In this case, as so often, Roussel’s seemingly unworldly eccentricity turned out to be ...”

“... Myself’, a strange mixture of swagger and meekness, clang and human: Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just, struck matches that brought my blood to a boil; I memorised the tricks to set the river on fire – somehow never wrote something to go back to. Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers and have earned my grass on the minor ...”

“... bold, confident, proud, unembarrassed, modern, European, grand. We were none of these things under John Major, and only partly one or two of them under Mrs Thatcher when we went to war. Furthermore, it was a very open, self-imperilling and therefore very trusting thing for a leader to do. Blair didn’t just take the national mood as fixed, he set about ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”