“... not just before his illness as in the play, but it is certainly true, as the King remarks, that in France she would not have got off so lightly. As it was, she lived on in Bedlam long after the witnesses to her deed were dead, surviving until the eve of the accession of George III’s granddaughter, Queen Victoria. I thought I had invented Fitzroy but discover ...”

“... a figure of industrial Britain as the sharecropper of Dust Bowl America, or the peasant of la France profonde. Such images, embedded in the national unconscious, and springing to life in times of crisis, were sufficiently potent to win the miners an astonishing breadth of public support during the national strike of 1972. Harold Macmillan, who as MP for ...”

“... the second time to a well-off widow, wrote The Spirit of the Age and the Life of Napoleon, toured France and Italy, and died in Soho in 1830 reputedly with the words: ‘Well, I’ve had a happy life!’ But what about Sarah Walker? She moves forever – alternately prim and sensuous, banal and bewitching – across the lurid stage of the Liber Amoris, but ...”

“... between the lofty and the very small – as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad. Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr Gradgrind’s side, his common sense – a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now ...”

“... of Boeing 727s, set up and consolidated the Juárez cartel. Then the army arrived and the number rose. By the end of 2008, there were 1300 dead; in 2009, 2300; in 2010, 3800. The official explanation: the cartels, driven into a panic by the law and order offensive, were slaughtering each other, and 95 per cent of the victims were criminals. Yet it was ...”

“... not just tourists but prospective residents and second-homers. Cyprus prospered. House prices rose. Ticket prices fell. More visitors, more residents, more houses, more money. First it was people with money seeking homes; then, in a shift that was barely noticeable until after it had happened, it was people seeking a home for their money. Is there some ...”

“... What’s more, the conflict is spreading to America’s allies, including Australia, Canada, France and the UK.It is hard to escape the impression that we have reached a point of historic rupture, and that is the feeling conveyed by this recent crop of books on Sino-American tensions. Not only do they offer a chronicle of mounting tension but, though ...”

“... funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on holiday there. Before Christmas she and her sister took off for South America and this last week the market men in Inverness Street got a postcard from Stephanie in Peru, which they pinned up on ...”

“... He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties. Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany which Mann had had with his brother ...”

“... comparative research. Yet while there were in Moscow dozens of specialists on the United States, France or West Germany, there was not a single one on Georgia or Estonia. The Baltic republics, annexed by Stalin in 1940, formed a region of their own within the USSR. There political organisation under perestroika had first taken outspoken nationalist form. But ...”

“... Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable. The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French ...”

“... motives – he once took him, on Keats’s dime, to gamble and visit brothels in the South of France. But George was younger, less responsible and impatient to start his own life. He had been waiting only to turn 21 and claim his inheritance before he married Georgiana Wylie and took off for America.His abrupt decision to emigrate was a bad blow, but for ...”

“... fight a full-scale naval war, where its sheer size would put off any potential enemy (Russia and France were then the favourites, and the Royal Navy’s ships outnumbered both these countries’ Navies put together). ‘Five strategic keys lock up the world,’ Admiral (later First Sea Lord) Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher said. He had in mind Singapore, the ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland. No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas ...”