“... but it’s still the case that the costing of the proposals looks shaky. It didn’t help that David Cameron got his Boden knickers in a twist about whether or not the Tories are going to subsidise marriage through the tax system. The sight of the Tories beginning to flounder in this area prompts a dark thought. I’ve argued that economic constraints are ...”

“... or even regret and remorse. But something else: a different combination of ingredients maybe (the French decided to call it ‘autofiction’ at one point) – one which at a pinch you might call on to explain the fascination of Ferrante as well, of Bolaño, or Sebald – where ‘experiment’ is no longer a matter of novelistic form but of its raw ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... had four detentions. He got an A in Maths and Drama, but did less well in English and got a D in French (‘Ronald made very little progress this year’). He got an A in Metalwork, but the teacher couldn’t think of his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and ...”

“... legal system must be decentralised. Its proceedings must be in English, not in barbarous Norman French, the language that had been imposed by the ‘tyrant’ William the Conqueror. It is absurd to hang people for petty theft, especially since theft can be caused by ‘great necessity’. But most important of all, the Church must be overhauled: the abuses ...”

“... its new prominence to such an extent that a quasi-fascist party scored 34 per cent in the French presidential elections, which were nonetheless hailed as a triumph for the ‘centrist’ winner.The left, let’s be honest, has had a pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to ...”

“... were scores and scores of cars there and hundreds and hundreds of spectators both English and French. Everyone was talking and chatting, when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster, but a very graceful machine, with beautiful lines, lozenge-shaped, but with two clumsy-looking wheels behind it. (These wheels were to be phased out ...”

“... Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico, The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of ...”

“... Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a mediocre politician who heads the foreign affairs committee of the French Assembly, announced that native Ukrainian refugees arriving in France would be a user-friendly, high-calibre intake (‘une immigration de qualité’).In early March the European Commission activated the ‘temporary protection directive’, an instrument ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... was the real cause of Mandelstam’s first arrest a day or two after the face-slapping incident: David had faced Goliath with eight stony couplets in his sling. The Moscow apartment was searched by the secret police, Mandelstam was taken to their headquarters in the Lubianka Prison, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn, where, in a ...”

“... true rites of passage to punctuate the journey which takes him from an adolescence spent studying French at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill (hanging out with poets and artists, going to Sartre’s lectures, listening to Sidney Bechet at the Vieux Colombier) to adulthood: through Harvard Business School and the Fifties, those years of pride which Kiam spent ...”

“... rearmament of Iran and Iraq. They had their hero in Alan Clark at Trade and their bogey-man in the French, who as all decent Brits know, will sell anything to absolutely anybody. At the meeting on 21 December, the three ministers agreed to relax the third guideline. Whereas it had previously said (my italics), ‘we should not in future sanction new orders for ...”

“... many of them silk weavers, had been arriving there since the start of the 18th century to escape French persecution. And in 1882, following the pogroms in Russia, East European Jews began to settle in the area and to make what was already a ghetto their own. Some saw East London as a mere interlude, a brief stopping-off point on the way to North London or ...”