“... More​ than a million migrants crossed the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis of 2015, with about 850,000 landing in Greece and the remainder in Italy. By March 2016 the EU had signed an agreement with Turkey: Ankara would do its best to ensure that the refugees (mostly Syrian) pushing up into Turkey would remain there, while the EU would send refugees arriving in Greece (mostly but not all Syrian) back to Turkey ...”

“... prey; survival depends on stealth. Luo Ji is appointed by the UN as one of the Wallfacers, a small group of individuals charged with formulating plans to combat the Trisolarans. They are called Wallfacers after a Buddhist meditation technique that involves staring in silence at a wall, because in order to evade the sophons they work alone and don’t have to ...”

“... change. Parr isn’t an ex-servicewoman or a professional military historian, but a lecturer in international relations at Keele University, ‘not accustomed to a military mindset’, as she puts it. Yet by the end of her book, much of this critical distance has disappeared, and Parr describes the Paras as ‘the finest regiment on earth’. It was founded ...”

“... is ‘shrewed’ (not, one assumes, a chauvinistic allusion to his wife) on page 209, the Regency crisis of 1788 is in part ‘a constitutional problem with gave implications’ (page 339), page 286 tells us twice in three lines that William Ogilvie was a Scotsman; Whitley Stokes is ‘thanked for his answer to Paine by the board of Trinity College’ on page ...”

“... After such injury, what forgiveness?’ Cabrera refuses to criticise any aspect of a West in crisis, and he dismisses brutal rightwing dictatorships as merely ‘inept’ – his word for Videla’s Argentina. Batista’s Cuba, of course, enjoyed a flourishing economy in which racism was non-existent. (Is Cabrera unaware that the mulatto President ...”

“... breakdowns and depressions, are twice as prone to suicide as married men. But the most cheerful group of women, the least prone to mental problems, are the never-married. This is of course not the view promoted in the media (past or present), which have been quick to apply to the unmarried or not yet married woman (as to the divorced or widowed female) the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”