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“... any other country. French literature, in the days of Sartre, Camus and De Beauvoir, enjoyed an international readership probably without equal in the postwar world, well beyond its standing between the wars. So when De Gaulle came to power, on the back of military revolt in Algiers, the dilapidated estate he inherited in fact offered solid bases for ...”

“... demographers and business people believe it is, especially in the US, where one migrant group after another – Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish – has auditioned for a role in the great musical of American identity. The competition has been bitter, especially between newcomers and predecessors, and the typecasting has been crude, yet sooner or later ...”

“... Moon. But the corpses of thousands of the poor were collected every year from the pavements of the International Settlement. Today beggars approach you discreetly on the Bund, Shanghai’s embanked riverfront, whose grand buildings once housed the banks, trading houses and diplomatic missions of China’s foreign overlords. The destitute are more invisible ...”

“... Day, the blockbuster sci-fi movie from 1996. Pullman, playing the US president, is rallying a group of pilots about to launch a jet fighter attack on one of the gigantic alien spacecraft that have been attacking Earth. It happens to be 4 July. He ends his speech on behalf of humankind, with the music swelling: ‘Today, we celebrate our independence ...”

“... a misjudgment of mind-bending proportions. Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their ...”

“... book is plumped out by the editors’ introduction of 116 pages, mostly sketching the domestic and international background to the crisis and occupying nearly half as much space as the diary extracts themselves. Margot’s journals too, it seems, are to be conscripted into the hunt for the truth about the war. At first ...”

“... pounds and the HS2 Action Alliance has funded expensive reports from consultants, but another group, Stop HS2, has had to launch an appeal to pay its co-ordinator, Joe Rukin, who is self-employed; in December he was paid just £380, which Rukin said had forced him to ‘reconsider his position’. Despite this group’s ...”

“... a place to test our personal limits – how tough, how callous, how crazy we could be.’ A group of ‘good boys’ (he insists), barely out of college, goes wild. Furer became a sadist. Without anything ever being stated, he feels that was what was expected. But no one wants to admit to it; no one wants to see (it was only with great difficulty that ...”

“... Mr Bengu’s job is such a bed of nails is that under apartheid each homeland and each racial group had its own education department. In addition, white education was split between several departments. The result is that Bengu has the difficult, longwinded and expensive job of amalgamating 19 different education departments into one. In only slightly ...”

“... earlier: for young socialist economists like Durbin, Gaitskell, Meade and Jay. Because of their group discussions Labour in 1945 ‘was intellectually prepared for the economic realities of power in a way inconceivable at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ample ingredients for Labour’s self-examination, how far does he guide the Party ...”

“... in terms like those used by the narrator of Whatever when he recounts a last chat with a friend in crisis: ‘He said to me: “See you soon.” I don’t believe it for a moment. I get the feeling we’ll never see each other again.’ The derelictions of parents are a source of more lasting trauma. Houellebecq has rarely seemed an angrier writer than when ...”

“... that have damaged him and us in Europe, such as moving the Conservatives out of the centre-right group in the European Parliament (hence the discreet support for Brown on the part of Merkel and Sarkozy) – but without much effect. Nonetheless, although he has made concessions to the Lib Dems on taxation, the Queen’s Speech included most of what the Tory ...”

“... was like some fraction to which everything had to be reduced.’H.D. can seem a kind of Zelig of international modernism: she knew or met almost everyone, cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock ...”

“... Thein Sein had been his loyal sidekick, the blinking and bespectacled face of the regime at such international gatherings as it was permitted to attend. Like most of his new ministers, he was a general who had only recently stepped out of uniform. Nothing happened in the early months of his notionally civilian government to dispel the sense of ...”

“... Few were surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”