“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... also themselves subject to violence from the left, which created martyrs still celebrated today. A French TV report on the 1996 election shows Meloni organising a group of young activists, almost all men, in Garbatella. Wearing a black leather jacket, she tells the reporter in passable French that Mussolini had been a good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be them,’ but she didn’t know how, so instead of that, she ‘made it’ once with David Johansen, the Dolls’ lead singer, and drove the band around, together with their girlfriends, in her father’s turquoise Buick.It was while she was following the Dolls around that Harry met Elda Gentile, who had the idea of forming a band called Pure ...”

“... own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial resistance. Rage, political and personal, took her yet further, to the assassins of 12th-century Persia, the nihilists of 19th-century Russia. I ...”

“... orthodox training to a Marxian research programme: to explain the course of capitalism since the French and Industrial Revolutions, no less, and to glimpse its future itinerary, with special reference to inequalities of income and wealth. By the age of 22, knowing ‘nothing about the world’s economic problems’, as he confesses, Piketty had produced a ...”

“... sick. For the first time, I noticed quite how pretty, and quite how nervous, she was. She was French, she was 19, and she had, she told me, a brother in the Free French navy. As I was slowly undressing, struggling with my Sam Browne, she picked up a silver-framed photograph from the dressing-table, and, giving it a ...”