“... packet of tampons; a plastic bag containing white granules like coarse salt, with instructions in French; a liquid soap dispenser; three pairs of women’s pants; a bag of cotton-wool balls; a pink sock; two child-sized pairs of jeans; a pink top next to trousers and a towel in the same colour; a bedspread with red and yellow hearts on it; a green plastic ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... of the capitalist world? Set beside the Dutch Revolt, America’s War of Independence, the French Revolution, Italy’s Risorgimento, the unification of Germany, let alone the Meiji restoration in Japan, the overthrow of the English monarchy seems of a different order: not a modern starting-point of institutional development, more an exotic ...”

“... the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Merkel has moved successfully to circumvent the will of French and Dutch voters, but was in no position to accomplish this on her own: for that, governments in Paris and the Hague were necessary. The prospects of any informal German hegemony in Europe, classically considered, seem at present remote. Part of the reason ...”

“... book, Girard, a professor at Stanford, was at number 14 in the magazine Lire’s hitparade of French intellectuals, while Derrida and Baudrillard were not even in the top 40. A decade later, Girard’s theory is still relatively little known outside France and California. But the theory is not difficult to summarise, for his several books – notably ...”

“... ago in London, during the winter of 1789. Frosty weather – the widower is warm against ‘the French insurrection’. Christmas Day takes him to church. Three years go by, and on the same day the same church receives him. ‘It vexed me that even on the festival of Christmas I was melancholy. I went with my son James to St George’s, Hanover Square, and ...”

“... worth going a little into the general question of why Lowland Scots, as different in pedigree as David Daiches, the film-maker Bill Douglas, Jimmy Boyle and Anne Smith, should be so determined to rake over and publicly display their childhoods (all more or less deprived childhoods, though in Daiches’ case less so from poverty than from an austerely Judaist ...”

“... controversy and generated intense public interest. Ian Dowbiggin’s piece of hereditarianism in French Psychiatry from 1840-90 (Volume One) explains how the concept of morbid heredity served the interests of the profession at a time when it was under attack from various sections of French society. It promoted professional ...”

“... rotting in the grass: the deeper identity structure founded by Great Britain’s defeat of the French Revolution. The scholarship of David Cannadine and Linda Colley has shown how this was done and how vital the monarchy was to the process. The rejigged royal institution was the mechanism for weening an ...”

“... what he came to consider a ‘hysterical disregard for practicality’, he decided to major in French. For his English classes he wrote Firbankian short stories in a manner an unsympathetic tutor described as ‘rococo’, derived from ‘self-consciousness and reading’ and in some instances made ‘more than usually irritating by meagre content spread ...”

“... ceased to be one, it was a capital of the 19th century and of modernity. Sartre writes that the French were probably most free under Nazi occupation. You feel something similar, but on an incomparably larger scale, when you survey the curiously munificent and playful texts and artwork that Bengal produced from the 1860s to the 1970s. Tagore repeatedly ...”

“... were in the Guardian’s hands. The government soon realised how wrong that was, and on 18 August David Miranda, Greenwald’s partner, en route from Berlin to Rio, was taken aside at Heathrow and held under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. He was, they believed, carrying an encrypted copy of at least some of the Snowden documents, the estimated number of ...”

“... Anglicans went, so did their prayer book. A heroic work of chronological listings published by David Griffiths in 2002 rounded up about 4800 editions of the Prayer Book or of liturgies stemming from its Scottish and American derivatives; around 1200 of these are in 199 other languages, ranging from the Acholi of Uganda to Zulu. Griffiths demonstrated that ...”

“... responded with tear gas. ‘The foreigners wouldn’t move. There were Americans, Italians and French. The soldiers got out of the tank to pull people away. They kicked them, but they could not get through. We effectively opened the road for a few hours.’ The checkpoint was moved closer to Ramallah with the result that students and teachers had a longer ...”

“... before the war by the museum authorities at the behest of Saddam. Two days later, in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch seconded Cruickshank, and right-wing commentators in the US took up the story. Later that month, many of the same media figures used part of a statement by Donny George, the director of the Iraq Museum, to bury the story that had embarrassed the ...”