“... the Maastricht criteria, called a snap election simply because he feared things would get tougher by the time Parliament’s mandate ran out in 1998. He was eager, too, to take advantage of the fact that the Socialist Party was still in a mess after the devastating unravelling of the Mitterrand Presidency and its own catastrophic defeat in the 1993 ...”

“... Hecht to join him with an offer of $300 a week to write for Paramount Pictures: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ Hecht took his advice. Two years later he won the first Oscar for best story, for Underworld, directed by Josef von Sternberg (at that ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still don’t feel that I’ve got to the bottom of it. First published in 1992, it is a novel disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a novel, based on the author’s first marriage, to Sylvia Bloch – a love ...”

“... A Second World War veteran who became a close friend and ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was killed by Irish republicans when a bomb attached to his car exploded as he left the underground car park at the Palace of Westminster. Speaking to the Media Society in 1977, Neave had pitched his idea for a ‘Belfast Starsky and Hutch’ that would show ‘Protestants ...”

“... The wild​ , dark and very funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land (2004), ‘and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out ...”

“... David Wallace​ ’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague ...”

“... military supplies to preserve internal security’ and ensure that they were permanently guarded by Western navies. Other parts of the world – the US, Russia, Canada – have large deposits of crude oil, and current estimates suggest Venezuela has more proven reserves than Saudi Arabia. But Gulf oil lies close to the surface, where it is easy to get at ...”

“... Once upon a time there was a little girl who, at the age of two, had in some fashion to be told that her father had just cut off the head of the beautiful mother who used to lavish affection on her, and pretty clothes. Shortly afterwards the child learned that, although she retained contact with him, she had been officially repudiated as her father’s daughter, even if she probably had to wait a while before having it explained that this occurred because her mother had been accused both of adultery and incest ...”

“... Who were you closest to as a child? How often do you phone your mum? What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why? Questions like this are what Lynn Barber uses to open up her celebrity interviews, and I think you can see why. They’re simple, direct, upfront and ...”

“... The world is a complex place. That is a truism, but perhaps complexity can be investigated rather than taken for granted. Think of the sorts of causal interaction one might regard as ‘complex’. In 2002, Avshalom Caspi and collaborators published a widely reported study in which they concluded that the degree to which abuse in childhood increases the likelihood that men will exhibit antisocial behaviour later in life was partly dependent on the presence of a gene that appears to control the activity of an enzyme called monoamine oxydase A ...”

“... closer – I had to use the OED – you find that the Latinate words are very purposefully derived by way of French: adjoindre is more common in French than its equivalent is in English; and ‘precision’, here, carries a meaning that is slightly less obsolete in French than it is in English, that of cutting off or trimming, making the sentence just ...”

“... been in touch and had been given short shrift; others she had never met. ‘Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents.’ The soufflé-ish quality of Carole Klein’s Life of Lessing irresistibly suggests that Klein, who approached the forbiddingly private ...”

“... of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.* (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous ...”

“... The word​  cunt was invented by the Norwegians. At first the OED wouldn’t have it in its pages and even today the dictionary describes it as the most taboo word in English. Norsemen said kunta and the Danes said kunte, as did ninth-century Germans, though not, seemingly, in anger or spite. Apparently, the first known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane ...”