“... Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that self-reliance was good, state handouts bad. Right to Buy was a massive ...”

“... no longer existed. The hunt was on for fixers. Before long Dos Santos and his diplomats found Pierre Falcone, the French billionaire ‘consultant’, and the Russian-Israeli ‘import-export’ maverick Arkady Gaydamak, who arranged for a series of unauthorised arms deliveries to the MPLA. The ‘Angolagate’ deal was powered by the French, whose thirst ...”

“... de Beauvoir, ltalo Calvino, Marguerite Duras, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Juan Goytisolo, André Pierre de Mandiargues, Alain Jouffroy, Joyce Mansour, Alberto Moravia, Octavio Paz and some others who couldn’t even pronounce the name of Padilla correctly, much less read his poems. It was a case of tit for tat. The European and Latin American intellectuals ...”

“... Fifty British and French engineers and their families were swiftly expelled, among them Pierre Angot, identified in the captured documents as a member of the co-ordinating ‘general staff’ of the Deuxième Bureau (the equivalent of MI6), which was working alongside British intelligence.Angot was the technical director of Steaua Romana, and worked ...”

“... the court, setting an energetic example himself.In all this he was seconded from 1967 onwards by Pierre Pescatore, another kin appointment, brother-in-law of the prime minister of Luxembourg and a more outspoken and prolific champion of federalism even than Lecourt – his legal opinions serving in the words of one witness as the ‘shock troops’ of ...”