“... 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 ...”

“... A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... learned from her mistake. On her arrival at the State Department, she began courting General David Petraeus, the ‘architect of the successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq’ according to Allen and Parnes, whom she had offended in 2007 by questioning his rosy assessments of American military prospects. In early 2009, Petraeus was head of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is fast forgetting all his German. This seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... Lebanon’s confessional arrangement is modern, coalescing in the 19th century and completed by French colonial rule in the 20th. A strain of Orientalism compounds our refusal – for political and propaganda reasons – to describe Hizbullah with any accuracy. The behaviour of Muslims, Arabs, and Orientals in general, is the expression of an impermeable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”