“... a huge corporation, but it specialises in bringing off surprises. In the 1970s, Hunt acquired a North Sea field called Beatrice for $50,000; a few years later it was valued at $500 million. ‘We have a reputation for never squeezing the last nickel out of a deal,’ Hunt has said of his company’s ethos. ‘My grandmother had an expression: “Pigs get ...”

“... Refugees have paid a high price for this decision. They have also paid for the new prestige of the North American social and economic model – unrivalled now, but all the more conspicuous in its failings. The racially diverse society is a deeply troubling notion in Europe. The grinding together and shifting of peoples – the tectonic population movements ...”

“... but as a threat to an indebted nation still embroiled in distant wars, with land borders to north and south that it can’t patrol as effectively as it would like and unemployment hovering at around 9 per cent. The US already has more than 11 million unauthorised migrants. About six and a half million are from Mexico and another two million from other ...”

“... The woods around London offered some curious sights in the 1840s. To the north in Epping Forest the infant William Morris could be seen riding out in a toy suit of armour, while down in Surrey, in the Tillingbourne Valley, little Gertrude Jekyll was learning to make gunpowder. In the event it was Morris who became the political revolutionary and Gertrude Jekyll who withdrew into a secluded world of romance in the house and garden she created at Munstead Wood ...”

“... and Baggit’s psychedelic killing sprees might be seen as an extreme example of this. For the North Vietnamese, in complete contrast, the conflict was the endgame of decades of fighting. As Bao Ninh – who fought in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade of the NVA – makes devastatingly clear in his first novel, the sorrows of war were long a part of the ...”

“... could now afford to turn its attention to Eritrea. Despite more pressing concerns elsewhere, the north-eastern front posed serious problems for the PMAC from the moment it took power. A disastrous Ethiopian campaign in the spring of 1976 was followed by an Eritrean offensive at the end of the year. The Eritreans went on to take all the key towns in the ...”

“... cared about the play. It was Dead-eye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. Would we have a novel, then, if there were no authorial guilt to be discharged? The question is a blunt one, and yet it gains in significance if ...”

“... France and China to retain nuclear weapons, has been gradually eroded, as Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and, briefly, apartheid South Africa, have unofficially joined the club. Now Iran, too, may be trying to develop the bomb, and has threatened to withdraw from the treaty, as North Korea did in 2003. Iran’s ...”

“... skins. In 1817, when Delano’s book was published, most politicians and intellectuals in both the North and the South agreed on the abstract wrongs of slavery, but not on the way to abolish it. In 1855, when Melville wrote ‘Benito Cereno’, Southern politicians no longer acknowledged slavery as an evil (even a necessary one), arguing that it spared whites ...”

“... Someone clearly had it in for Sony. But who? The FBI pointed the finger at China’s ally North Korea: Sony was about to release The Interview, a comedy involving an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un. But the attack was astonishingly sophisticated. An official from the FBI’s Cyber Division was reported as saying that the malware used could get ...”

“... billion in imports and exports pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out against the French coast. Nicolas Deshayes – an artist who lives on the hill, just below Henry II’s magnificent 12th-century castle, the largest in England – revels in the spectacle of choreographed movement. He makes works that ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... on their lives before autumn 1888. Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but here he is treated by Rubenhold as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more panoramic and human version of one of the most infamous crimes of the early 20th century’. Chiefly, she tells the life ...”

“... always remember where facts ended and conjecture began – the commercial life of ancient North Africa. This manic thoroughness was no penance but a comfort, because long immersion in such alien matter was what Flaubert needed if he wasn’t to succumb to his indignation at the world around him: ‘If I go so slowly, it is because a book for me is a ...”

“... the Airbus 380, which is made in Wales. (They’re so big that they travel from the Dee estuary in North Wales to Pauillac on the Gironde estuary on a specially built roll-on roll-off ship.) This industrial work is high-skill, high-value, and doesn’t provide mass employment; it’s a lot like the kind of service work which thrives in London and the ...”