“... afford to move to the house where they lived for the rest of their lives, in idyllic La Jolla just north of San Diego. Marlowe remained in LA. The author who once said he ‘lived on the edge of nothing’ gave that existence to his protagonist, in whom were combined the drinker of Chandler’s successful, social Twenties and the itinerant, lonely, anonymous ...”

“... Isaacs’s plan had been to bring one in from outside, which would have involved ‘dropping’ Paul Findlay, who after years of helping to make things work for Tooley was at last in the driving seat as opera director. When Isaacs mentioned his plan to Tooley over breakfast at the Savoy, a snag emerged. Aware that Haitink had decided that the experienced ...”

“... certainly of a lot more interest (and influence) after the Beatles had taken it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a ...”

“... of strangers’ unsettles Mukasonga. She is told that their new neighbours are ‘Hutus from the north of the country [who have] been given a place at the far end of our field’. Thirty-seven members of her family are killed in the genocide, yet when she returns a decade later, in 2004, these neighbours still occupy the same field. She confronts the father ...”

“... Labour – for voters, the journey between the parties isn’t a difficult one,’ the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney told me. ‘You get a lot of people on the doors swithering, to the extent that one piece of literature or a breaking story could change their view.’ The question was whether Ahmed, the party’s candidate in Glasgow South West, was someone who ...”

“... triumph under the acronym BBB – Black, Blanc, Beur (second-generation French immigrants from North Africa). By then, however, the original B.B. was an enemy of migrants, especially those of Muslim origin; she was beside herself about halal butchery and mosques in France and her dismal comments landed her in court for incitement to racial hatred.Her ...”

“... became a power in the land as the operations of the Mafia extended from Sicily to Rome and the North. Other national shortcomings are often noted: administrative inefficiency, lack of respect for the law, want of patriotism. But in the widespread conviction that the condition of Italy is abnormal, immovable government, pervasive corruption and militarised ...”

“... bombs, breaking glass, stones hurled at cars: the riots of 2011 travelled from Clarence Road, just north of the Old Rectory, down Mare Street to the nexus of commercial enterprises, the betting shops that used to be banks, around Hackney Central station. Funds provided by central government for regeneration were siphoned into factory outlets for ...”

“... home these days to Emmerdale, that hotbed of the lust, murder and arson so typical of rural North Yorkshire. 29 March. One unforeseen blessing of the war in Iraq is the settlement in Northern Ireland. Blair can hardly claim the credit, as it was only when the focus moved to the Middle East that there was real progress towards agreement in Northern ...”

“... which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our life’ we forget ‘the sorrows of the other half’. And so on, ‘from the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables, from the lowest depths of hell to the last fixed star beyond the ...”

“... of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 state-owned companies and their 650,000 employees: he fired half a ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... breasts – nipples – yolks) is crass and juvenile. Painter and Model shows a clothed Celia Paul with her brush pointing at the model’s penis, while her naked right foot squeezes paint out of a tube on the floor. This makes the visual double entendres in James Bond movies look sophisticated. Early on, he painted with a Memling-like precision, each ...”

“... remarkable goal against Belgium in 1994, from France’s sweat-sodden defeat in Seville in 1982 to North Korea’s improbable victory in Middlesbrough in 1966’, the World Cup has become an indelible part of countless national stories.It is the recovery of these contexts that gives Wilson’s history its latitude as well as salience. He not only has the ...”

“... France, always averse to identity politics, tended to agree.Caribbean, Asian, Turkish or North African were no longer the descriptions that mattered. The defining term was ‘Muslim’: what Muslims did and thought was suddenly central to the immigration debate. Increasingly, the debate was about protecting European values by trying to bring existing ...”