“... into Savoy to kidnap Mandrin, despite the possible diplomatic ramifications. On the evening of 10 May 1755, a French officer ordered his men to take off their uniforms and blacken their faces, then led them across the Guiers river into Savoy. They found Mandrin peacefully asleep in the château de Rochefort, threw him, still in a nightdress, into a cart, and ...”

“... confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. Brooks called it correctly: the Republicans, egged on by their newly empowered Tea Party ...”

“... unknown,/as always the outcome is unknown’ – take that, Mr Rumsfeld) to the place we began. It may be to comic or grievous effect. It is an adventitious gallivanting movement across country that makes denser, bunched sense than any more rational or measured or predictable progress. It looks baroque, but actually it’s stringent – and vice versa. (I’ve ...”

“... part just me being a jackass.’ Shteyngart’s high school and college years sail by. It may be the old problem of the pages accumulating and the pressure to wrap the book up, or it may be that it’s easier to tell the stories of childhood, to find the narrative and the humour, and harder to say what happened just ...”

“... Activities Committee. Kuhle Wampe was initially banned, but after cuts it was released in May 1932 and attracted large audiences. In July that year the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. A month later, with a perverse sense of timing, Brecht borrowed money from his father to buy a house on the Ammersee in Bavaria. Any hope he had of an ...”

“... is erratic in his office work, and that his appearances abroad resemble cabaret performances, may not matter much. As the editors of The People Reloaded write, ‘Iran is a rentier state, which means it pays its bills from the sale of oil rather than through taxation. This gives the regime a significant degree of autonomy from society, which immunises it ...”

“... to write the book of the world – for instance, the criteria for the success of our attempt – may turn out to reflect certain peculiarities of ours. Is there something about the exercise that is fundamentally anthropocentric, for example? Or fundamentally ethnocentric? Or fundamentally androcentric? Perhaps what counts as an optimal description of the ...”

“... cakes (and not above stealing and swindling to buy them), not academically gifted. Baker thinks he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended ...”

“... one thing: it is less defensible when you do it on behalf of your progeny, something Alibhai-Brown may be aware of when she expresses the wish that one day both TL and the ‘beloved son’ will write their own versions of the story which ‘will contradict mine on every point’. (I have to say that I hope they don’t: I already know enough of this ...”

“... vigorous exercise of hard power to prolong the postwar Pax Americana. In ways that Obama himself may only dimly appreciate, his decision on Afghanistan affirms the pre-existing character of US foreign policy. But by advocating ‘counter-insurgency’, the McChrystal report also represents a tacit acknowledgment that a decades-long military reform project ...”

“... his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the greatest of the ...”

“... of the judge’s friends visited him in jail, demanding $50,000. He also thinks initial rulings may have gone against Maharaj because he didn’t pay up. Maharaj’s lawyer didn’t call for an investigation or a mistrial, and Stafford Smith believes this is because ‘Hendon was on a set fee. If the case had to start up again, he would have to spend days ...”

“... rocce sopra il Tajmyr.’ If Vostyach seems a less convincing idea in English than in Italian it may partly be that cultural predispositions are to blame. Marani’s Vostyachs ‘had found the passage towards another world in the darkness of the forests and had never wanted to turn back’ (‘nel buio delle foreste avevano trovato il passaggio verso un ...”

“... on Grub Street without ever being seen by a soul, subsisting on gruel, salad and weak beer. She may have been intrigued by his unusual longevity. In 1646, perhaps feeling her own years, Jeffreys laid out 14d for Leonard Lessius’s Hygiasticon: Or, The right course of preserving Life and Health unto extream old Age. A much larger expense was clothing: early ...”

“... criteria) as well as an upbringing on a farm where he killed and observed nature close-up may have contributed to this breakthrough; but it was possible only because of his astonishingly pliant play with language. ‘Pigs’ contains the lines ‘Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp./We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush./Us all fuckers ...”