“... the Federal Election Commission, which oversees and enforces election and campaign finance laws, is now essentially defunct. Its members, evenly divided between the parties, serve six years and must be confirmed by the Senate. Since becoming majority leader, in 2015, McConnell has refused to confirm any new appointees. As the members rotate off, there ...”

“... 12 June, the arrows indicated that the German army was twenty miles from Paris. (Not on the map, David and Wallis Windsor leaving France in a convoy of cars loaded with their luggage.) Harriet and Clarencesaw that the illuminations had been switched off in the Cismigiu. The park, where people walked in summer until all hours, was now silent and deserted, a ...”

“... since it is the Commission – the EU’s unelected executive – alone that can propose the laws on which the Council and (more notionally) the Parliament deliberate. The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority – a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative – is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid ...”

“... had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social aspect ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...”

“... own half-Kurdish origins – he came from Malatya in the east – and to loosen the most draconian laws against the use of Kurdish as a language. But on his sudden death in 1993, Demirel grabbed the presidency, and torture and repression intensified. The rest of the 1990s saw a succession of weak, corrupt coalitions that reproduced the trajectory of the ...”

“... border control and white-collar crime. Promotion depends on arrest rates, which are assisted by laws that no longer distinguish between the sale and the consumption of drugs, nor require witnesses for apprehension on the spot, offering a quick route to the criminalisation of poverty, as the young and black – pardo (‘mixed race’) and preto ...”