“... first stage of Abacha’s transition programme spelt out the previous October. The elections were held on a ‘zero-party’ basis, ostensibly in recognition of Nigeria’s ‘historical and cultural peculiarities’, but in reality to enable the Government to ban suspect candidates at will. In one state alone, nearly a hundred would-be councillors were ...”

“... is important and not merely pedantic (though it is that as well) lies in a meeting that was held on 21 December 1988, four months after the end of the Gulf War. Present were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about ...”

“... Leone, which is currently the company’s biggest area of operations. Last February Sierra Leone held its first multi-party elections since 1977. The transition to democracy was negotiated under the aegis of an unstable military leadership; the election was taking place six weeks after an officers’ coup had replaced the president; parts of the country were ...”

“... father-son reunion, though: ‘On either side of the door they stood, a hand raised and a hand held forth, their extended arms abscissa and ordinate for the point of ordination where their eyes met on the inordinate curve of doubt.’ The door between them is closed as a matter of physical fact, so the meeting of their eyes can only be a symbolic ...”

“... the idea of reading. While novelists who wrote in formed, settled and multi-layered societies held a mirror up to those societies in all their variety or to the vicissitudes of the human heart, Borges and O’Brien and Pessoa held instead a mirage up to an oasis, the strange place they came from which gave them their ...”

“... that they could not be Borked. Stealth has its own dangers. Bush thought he had a neo-con in David Souter, but he had been misinformed. He did a better job the next time. Clarence Thomas had arrived in Washington at the age of 31, and never left the Beltway thereafter, so his neo-con development could be carefully monitored. At 43, he had put in loyal ...”

“... makes his success even harder to understand. What was it about him that – despite all this – held so many in his spell? In his dealings with Dee, the sheer scale of his deception is staggering. Dee left reams of manuscripts recording the messages of angels and spirits, all of them dictated to him by Kelley: the ‘spirituall diaries’, as they are ...”

“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... he was a celebrity. French writers and American expatriates flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held court a short walk from his Left Bank flat. ‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... risk was negligible; to the patient it was critical, and she recovered damages because the court held that the patient’s and not the doctor’s appraisal of the acceptability of risk counted and that, told of the risk, she would have declined surgical intervention. Research has produced remarkable figures of risk acceptability: people will accept high risk ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch MP, Mr Nigel Dempster, The Earl of Derby, The Duke of Devonshire ...’ And so on through the alphabet. ‘If I have inadvertently omitted anyone, I ask forgiveness. Some have asked that their help remain unacknowledged.’ Those whose good offices ...”

“... lesson in ingenuity and hard work crowned by success after success. By the time he died he held 1093 patents across an extraordinary range of endeavour, for telegraphy, telephony, electricity, acoustics, cement housing, artificial pearls, the forerunner of the mimeograph and a way of getting electricity from coal. He also left five million pages of ...”

“... of female sexual insensibility surprising: they make it incredible. Whether or not Acton genuinely held such a conviction in a restricted form (‘the majority ... are not very much troubled’), an unforced reading of his remarks – without any resort to Freud for a ‘leap’ of interpretation – strongly suggests that his readers did not. (A similar ...”