“... to the cause of peace.The appelés arrived in Algeria by boat, from the port of Marseille. Algeria may have been ‘France’, but for most conscripts it was their first time overseas. Enchanted by the landscape, the blue-green sky and the dramatic bay of Algiers, they sent home postcards of 19th-century paintings. ‘The topics of Orientalism are ...”

“... concerned with literary rivals, now he’s worried about competitors for political space. Navalny may be bourgeois, but if by Russian manliness the boggle-eyed patriots mean courage, it’s hard not to see courage in a man who returns to the country whose government poisoned him, knowing he’ll be arrested. Navalny is now serving a prison sentence, a fate ...”

“... protection to ensure her Italian schools weren’t closed down. De Stefano suggests this may have been the reason she never won the Nobel Peace Prize, although she was nominated three years in a row (1949, 1950 and 1951).In 1928, she wrote to Mussolini calling him the ‘saviour’ of the human race and saying that her work depended on him. In ...”

“... and greeted Henry Kissinger with bear hugs and heavy jokes. When the president came to Moscow in May 1974, he found Brezhnev ‘like a big Irish labour boss’, backslapping at one moment and at the next bellowing with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a terrified witness to Brezhnev’s ...”

“... and it makes me feel deeply uneasy to watch him knock himself out with booze. Although the scripts may allude to some of the problems of alcohol abuse, there’s still a glamour in seeing that beautiful face downing a glass or a bottle. ‘Why can’t you lose your good looks, Brick?’ the Elizabeth Taylor character asks in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. ‘Most ...”

“... the Mafia. The ex-mafiosi who accuse him need not be believed, literally. The magistrates may need their evidence but the rest of us do not. For Andreotti was openly and very closely associated with Sicilian politicians who in turn were openly and very closely associated with the Mafia. Alliances evolve over time, in accordance with shifts in relative ...”

“... count for him since Guibert feels he alone fully exists on the page. Although his narcissism may give an antic energy to his prose, fortunately it does not hood his observing eye. His characters are very real indeed and his betrayals as succulent as those Genet promises but seldom delivers. Among his photographs are portraits of his friends, many of whom ...”

“... assumed before reaching a resolve from which nothing could shake him, I heard him say: ‘This may be the most foolish idea I have ever had, but I think that I should like to have on my headquarters someone who could talk about Proust.’ I joined the Headquarters at Hythe, and shortly afterwards, we moved to Battle Abbey, which in peacetime was a ...”

“... and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions attached to the sale of the paper. But Rowland is a very determined character – as is shown by his relentless fight with the House of Fraser over the future of Harrods. He is the kind of man ...”

“... almost powerless by the actions of distant states, such as North Vietnam, Iran and Israel (and may well now be adversely affected by events in certain of the smaller Latin American states). Naturally this gloomy account can be contested. Every President since Truman can be presented in a more favourable light, and it can be argued that historians should ...”

“... things that are going to happen to you this evening are going to do you a lot of good. They may even change you a little. But there is one thing you must not do. You must not resist. If you resist it will be hopeless. If you resist it will be like trying to drive a car with the brakes on.’ He paused. They didn’t take their eyes off him. ‘We’ll ...”

“... bureaucrats, surely one of the least romanticisable social groupings imaginable on this earth. He may also have liked the element of self-mortification involved in this choice, or perhaps it was the challenge he found exciting: ‘To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human,’ he has a nameless character say at one ...”

“... by his white thobe, Ahmad exuded energy and an air of confidence even though what he is doing may land him in jail. He was on the phone talking urgently to another member of a newly formed committee to help detainees in Qatif. ‘Do I tell him to surrender himself to the police or not? Five men went in yesterday and they haven’t been heard from ...”

“... Sudanese brothers who had been released from Guantánamo called me: ‘Come, come!’ In April or May, I took a small bag, the court papers saying I was innocent and a few clothes. I gave all the rest to friends. I thought I’d never go back to Chad. In Darfur, I found a space in a lorries convoy to Khartoum. Each lorry had maybe fifteen persons on the ...”

“... it could inflict intolerable damage, not so much with its dozen or so nuclear warheads, which it may not be able to aim accurately at its enemies, but by conventional methods. Commandos infiltrated by submarine would cause terror and havoc in coastal cities in South Korea. Thousands of artillery pieces secreted in tunnels just over the border would bombard ...”