“... in the Olympics. ‘It’s a miracle that the Olympic movement survived,’ Coubertin admitted.By the time of the next Paris games, in 1924, Coubertin’s resilience, monomania and focus on what would now be called branding had succeeded in turning the Olympics into a global institution, which would soon supersede the ...”

“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

“... at their ease; it’s argumentative. Here and there the argument is illuminating, as when David Bomberg’s In the Hold (c.1913-14) is hung next to Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971). Both are busy compositions, with a mass of vigorous figures squeezed closely into a space. But the Bomberg is pretty abstract and is ...”

“... about young working-class women determined to get some joy out of a life that has been shaped by the needs and desires of others (not all of them men). By the time we meet these women, it’s generally too late for introductions. Someone, it seems, has gone ballistic. The films duly drop us in mid-rampage. People ...”

“... of Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh; for the moment he looked to be entering middle age in a state of some isolation and financial precariousness. Five years later, at the end of the period covered by this book, he had suffered a crushing series of disappointments and breakdowns, warred with ...”

“... and not just because of the quixotic behaviour of the British delegation. It was presided over by two politicians who were giving out a very mixed message. Nicolas Sarkozy told the world in the run-up to the meeting that this was the moment of truth not just for the currency but for the future of democracy. Europe only had a few days to save ...”

“... stock market, along with a national bank and joint stock company that would help pay for it all by exploiting the supposedly fabulous wealth of France’s new colony, Louisiana. But Louisiana was then rich in little but yellow fever and the scheme quickly collapsed, forcing Law to flee the country. Italy produced the extraordinary Lorenzo da Ponte. The son ...”

“... In the last of the three 2008 presidential debates it was the counter-blows that will probably be forgotten. Certainly, Barack Obama had and has effective voting data to counter the implication of McCain’s effective one-liner (‘I’m not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago’) while McCain was ...”

“... notes (the tacky little flags on the bagpipes, and George W. Bush reciting from a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost five sons in the Civil War, once again opportunistically figuring the deaths of unknowing civilians as military heroism), the opening ceremony on Sunday, 11 September had gone well. More important, none of the bereaved ...”

“... with a deeply sceptical American public whose doubts were being voiced with increasing stridency by Congress. In this the American legislature was given a lead by the British parliament, which on 29 August rejected two motions that might have paved the way for military action. When he lost the vote on the government ...”

“... only spurred a spurt of growth. Next year the trees began pumping out apples. I was drawn by their blossom’s scent each April the moment that they budded on the boughs. They seemed to burst from bud to fruit overnight. The lure for a child was to pluck and bite those tart infant apples before they swelled; there were casualties ...”

“... Who​ was Barack Obama? The man himself seems troubled by this question and his notably introspective memoir offers up some surprising answers. Was he, for instance, the same person as Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president? When Obama met with Medvedev in 2009 at a dacha outside Moscow, he was surprised by how familiar it all seemed ...”

“... never believed possible ... I fear that in our collective subconscious we are not perhaps repelled by the possibility of a Palestinian genocide.’ The Begin-Sharon Government is ‘reactionary’, ‘anti-democratic’, crazy. The Israelis must become Palestinians in their imagination in order to make peace with them. Based on essays which appeared in the New ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail ...”

“... they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it. The oligarchs who got rich by seizing the spoils of the post-Soviet economy sometimes have to pretend to be poorer than they really are, so as not to rouse public fury at the scale of their heist. Branson pretends to ...”