“... satisfying and at times very insightful. The descriptions he gives of the rise and progress of the international student movement and of feminism are sober, if only moderately enthusiastic in tone, particularly when he has to keep reminding us that traditional labour – from steel workers to telephone operators – declined in importance, as did the ...”

“... has brought civilisation to its knees, and that Western society faces a total and debilitating crisis as a result of materialism, scientism, individualism and rationalism. Nothing less than the abandonment of Enlightenment thought and the wholesale reorientation of politics around constitutive norms of community can save us, they say. Asked, however, for ...”

“... In the spring of 1966, China seemed a stable, disciplined and united nation. It was led by a group of men whose comradeship had been forged by the Long March, by Japanese aggression and by civil war. They had made a revolution and then boldly undertaken to remake a society of 600 million people. Their instrument of rule and regeneration was arguably the ...”

“... ongoing, cumulative warming effect. In 2001, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2500 scientists, predicted an additional increase during the 21st century of between 1.4 and 5.8°C. In October, a body of nearly 300 scientists completed the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report based not on worst-case scenarios but on observed ...”

“... a name devised in a journalistic stunt, given that he was the first criminal to become a figure of international mythology thanks to the global print media. Journalists were no more crude or excitable in this case than they had been before and had no need to exaggerate the gore; the mutilations were horrific and related news stories often shockingly ...”

“... the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there are the daughters of ‘ministers, high-ranking army ...”

“... more than a smattering of acclaim and a measure of derision. Two years later, in another moment of international prestige for France, Aimé Jacquet’s squad lifted the World Cup. The team was fêted as a mixed-race triumph under the acronym BBB – Black, Blanc, Beur (second-generation French immigrants from North Africa). By then, however, the original ...”

“... All around her, businessmen are avidly taking newspapers, so Selin takes one, too.From the International Herald Tribune, I learned that a ninety-five-hundred-pound elephant called Kika had been artificially inseminated in Berlin. The sperm had been taken from two male elephants and there was no way of knowing for certain which was the real father, but ...”

“... actually a porter at University College Hospital. His mother, Faouzia, was involved in the sewing group at the Westway Trust. ‘She sat by the window,’ a colleague said, ‘dropping a stitch when she saw something funny outside.’ R.D.’s family were from Casablanca and the El Wahabis from Larache.‘One time,’ R.D. said, ‘Yasin broke his foot. He ...”

“... weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi activities somewhere in Punjab’. Why had the Pakistani authorities held Akhtar for so long only to release him? In part in the hope of bending him to their will. But also because he knew too much ...”

“... a vivid impression of the precocious, iconoclastic schoolboy and student, centre of a devoted group of friends, a great party-giver and party-goer, famous for singing his own cabaret songs to the guitar; already influenced by Wedekind, Büchner and Rimbaud, he thought at 18 that he wrote better. Much of this account is new to English readers, who will at ...”

“... by U.V. ‘Bing’ Muscio, who became Muzak president in 1966. The aptly named Muscio, ‘a man of international education and culture... a man of forceful candour, concise wit and deft literary allusion’ (Muzak corporate blurb), ushered in the era of the ‘New Muzak’, setting up a Scientific Board of Advisers, psychologists and doctors who worked closely ...”

“... for the first time in Algiers. The two men clashed over Mitterrand’s commitment to a resistance group made up of former POWs (‘Why not a grocers’ contingent,’ De Gaulle asked him, ‘or a charcutiers’?’). In the second postwar parliamentary elections, in November 1946, Mitterrand won a seat in the Nièvre for the Rassemblement des Gauches ...”

“... founding a Barcelona cell of the Unión de Juventudes Antifascistas, a short-lived insurrectionary group set up by Catalan teenagers. After the UJA was rolled up, Marco’s story went on, he headed to France, only to get picked up by the Pétainist police and transferred to German custody. In truth, as Cercas shows, and got Marco to admit, the war wound was ...”

“... than 0.1 per cent in Italy to a maximum in Prussia of less than 2 per cent of the relevant age-group; university education was even more restricted. As it happens, this maximised the chances of the children of disproportionately prosperous small communities such as the Jews, especially given the high status that learning enjoyed among them. That is why the ...”