“... started muttering discontentedly. By the time the camera showed Omar’s uncle in his garage office humping away with his half-undressed, red-corseted mistress I was having doubts. ‘Bakwas!’ shouted my father. (Bollocks!) His milk was untouched. When we got to the scene in which Omar’s cousin, Tania, is so bored at a family get-together that she ...”

“... all copies of the lexicon were recalled for destruction, and a backdated one was produced by the Foreign Office with a forged year of publication. Such was the position on the eastern wing of the Raj: on its north-western salient, juridical visibility was still less. There, in 1897, the director of Military Intelligence in London had urged Britain to ...”

“... audience – ‘at it.’ The objection was overcome by the offer of £2 above the box-office take – more, it has been estimated, than the normal yield of a full house. The play was duly performed. What was the play? Five descriptions of it survive from the Government’s interrogations, prosecutions and apologias in the wake of the ...”

“... A literary assistant.’ The new amanuensis had a chair in the corridor, handy for the Queen’s office, on which when he was not on call or running errands, he would spend his time reading. This did him no good at all with the other pages, who thought he was on a cushy number and not comely enough to deserve it. Occasionally a passing equerry would stop and ...”

“... tea and last-minute advice from the helpful Witness Liaison Team of lawyers and Northern Ireland Office civil servants. Yes, we can affirm, like principled people, instead of swearing by Almighty God; yes, the proceedings are judicial and thus privileged like any court hearing; yes, we can lunch together as long as we don’t discuss our evidence. Then I am ...”

“... reminded her of psychiatric hospitals. She swapped impressions with her colleagues from the Commonwealth: ‘The class system? They’re in the Middle Ages.’ For a few months, she lived off Clapham Common, where she was taken under the wing of an overbearing Irish bus driver known in her autobiography as Patrick Reilly. Reilly wanted a ...”

“... war, the French held the cities with a scratch collection of Algerians, Senegalese, Tunisians and Foreign Legionnaires – mostly Germans – supplemented by Indochinese volunteers, all under French regular officers. The French did not fight for ‘victory’ over the Vietminh; they sought a military posture from which to negotiate an ‘honourable ...”

“... the Supreme Court), and indefensible abstention in the face of illiberal and oppressive conduct by Commonwealth regimes. They point, too, to the outcomes of a series of cases from Northern Ireland decided in the House of lords and in the European Commission and Court of Human Rights, in which principle seems to have taken second place to expediency and the ...”

“... Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations that impose on universities and student unions a new duty to ‘secure freedom of speech within the law’ for academics, students, staff and visiting speakers. What does this ...”

“... round the edges of the country, leaving a ‘hollow interior’, yet without stimulating major foreign trade; the lack of new industrial complexes comparable to the Ruhr or the Midlands; the hoarding of coinage and weakness of domestic credit; the failure to take effectively to the seas. France, Braudel concludes, was marginalised within the history of ...”

“... air, and in December 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian leader who had become Gorbachev’s foreign minister, suddenly resigned. ‘A dictatorship is coming. I declare this with total responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship it will be.’ Gorbachev, who had been given no warning of this speech, played it calmly. To the horror of his ...”

“... were models of post-communist success, flourishing democracies with governments alternating in office and economies operating without system-wide corruption. Russians, Furman concluded, should not be discouraged but should take heart from their example. For what was striking was the force of attraction of the new Baltic republics for the Russians living in ...”

“... and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide from 1922 – both published for the so-called ‘pilgrims’, the aged, widowed and dead-brothered, who flooded France and Flanders after the ...”

“... Today, Cameroon is a member of both the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie and the Commonwealth; English and French are both official languages. But anglophone separatists claim that the government in Yaoundé represents only the interests of francophone Cameroonians. In 2017 the demand for their own state escalated into an armed conflict which ...”