“... jumped by five degrees to 22°C. No culprit has been identified, but there was speculation on French meteorology forums that a battery-powered hairdryer may have been involved.Mischief is one thing, but the incident makes one consider more damaging behaviour. There has been betting on the extent of wildfires on Polymarket and at wyldfyre.io, a startup ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out of a few hundred yards of old degraded Hackney ...”

“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... populations were not sent to the gas chambers. That is, the descendents of Swedish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Greek, Polish, Korean, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all present in huge numbers in the United States, also fairly quickly lost their languages. (The only great exceptions here are the immigrants from Latin America, who have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... marked and ribbed by power and wealth. But Clare, unlike Burns, opposed those he called ‘the French Levellers’ – he saw the Revolutionaries as analogous to rapacious English enclosers – and in 1808 he joined the Eastern regiment of the Northampton militia. His military service involved only a few weeks of training, but he remained technically an ...”

“... and my job was to promote Anglo-German relations.Had you done German at school?No, not at all. French and Latin, I’d done. In Germany I had to write the scripts for a radio programme; I had to write local-boy stories, stories which commemorated a proud day in the life of Blank from Blank. Such and such a grand person came to visit etc, and then you took ...”

“... for lending the sovereign a great deal of gold, in the first instance to build a navy to fight the French, the Bank of England acquired the right to print paper money. That paper money could then be used by ordinary people to pay their taxes. It’s at this point that banks, money and the modern state become fused together. The money system and the banks and ...”

“... in some of the poetic, theoretical talk in the best of these coffee-table tomes, the Polish-French photographer Nicolas Grospierre’s Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture. ‘For me,’ Grospierre insists, ‘modernism, and architectural modernism in particular, is the embodiment of one of the greatest ideas in the history of ...”

“... and Forster’s mother, but Bess quickly got jealous and forbade ‘Tom’ to go to any more ‘French lessons’ at the Forsters’, timed while Lily was out shopping. The following year, though, Forster notes, ‘Tom came at last – but says his name is Dudley.’ Further encounters follow: ‘Tom 4 in all’; ‘Lust + goodwill – is anything more ...”