“... owing loyalty to the ancien régime and not above sabotaging their new political masters in the hope that this will help bring the old lot back. Politicians, knowing this, act accordingly: in the Greenpeace affair, the Elysée first heard of the disaster in New Zealand, not from the DGSE, which comes under the Defence Ministry, but from the Interior ...”

“... to disregard overt positions and look instead for the unspoken context. At the same time, we can hope to notice features of a writer’s thought which lie even deeper, below the level of his or her tendentious consciousness, and are fundamental assumptions of the sexual culture. The range of texts which may have a tendentious element is wide. Professor Gay ...”

“... includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap ...”

“... King argues with the Prince of Wales and the courtiers scurry after them trying to keep up. What I hope we capture is how wanting in proper ceremony the 18th-century monarchy was; how slipshod and unmanaged were its public appearances; and whatever the flummery, not much dignity about it at all. Then we shift to School Yard where the MPs mass on the staircase ...”

“... him to add further detours to his route in order to visit various provincial post offices in the hope of intercepting passing cheques at the poste-restante counter. Pot Luck in England was published as a travel book, and churches, castles and other conventional attractions are duly described in it. However, it’s also a caveat about the miseries awaiting ...”

“... they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of contemporary art but also to the publicity value of its more notorious players. The art market fell dramatically in 1990, three years after the stock market crash of ...”

“... and Dorothy Detail. A staff assistant called her Janie O. Gene Kelly called her Brunhilda. Bob Hope called her J.B. – for Jut Butt. Jerry Lewis called her Sylvia, but James Garner called her Sylvia-honey. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and sometimes Maude; she called him Ernie. Her son called her Sis. The character actor Billy de Wolfe called her Clara ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”

“... a series of biographical poems about scientists, inventors, engineers; a fair number of them – Charles Fourier, for example, and Wilhelm Reich – were completely crazy, though crazy in interesting ways. Enzensberger’s verse does two things superbly. It captures the mental states of its subjects (which often means their desolation or unhappiness), and it ...”

“... before he could become its first president); and he cleverly used a public lecture to explain to Charles Clarke, Blunkett’s successor at the Home Office, what Clarke shouldn’t have needed to have explained to him, namely that judges are ‘bound to take no notice’ of the views of government ministers, and so shouldn’t be expected to have cosy chats ...”

“... gives an additional transgressive thrill because it’s not in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ...”

“... Most of the refugees gathered in the Jungle, a ten-minute drive from the bronze statue of Charles de Gaulle and his wife on the place d’Armes in the centre of Calais, have fled countries where in recent years the French and British have dispatched troops or bombed from the air. Others have escaped from regimes armed by France and the UK. Afghans ...”

“... is sometimes open to question. Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ...”

“... by 1854.’ It was generally believed that the Ottoman Empire was effete and doomed and could hope to survive only if it was reformed from top to bottom. As early as 1833, Tsar Nicholas I diagnosed Turkey to Metternich as ‘the sick man’ (he doesn’t seem to have added ‘of Europe’). And the idea of stirring the Muslims into action on behalf of ...”

“... of China for mistreating Hong Kong after 1 July 1997 can be raised high enough to have some hope of being an effective deterrent to thuggery is for the question to be internationalised. The United States, the European Community, Japan and others should be persuaded to become collective guarantors of Hong Kong’s survival, under Chinese sovereignty but ...”