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“... at the end of 1977, Asad pressed him not to go to Jerusalem, but Sadat was adamant, arguing that a grand gesture from him would be reciprocated by Begin. It wasn’t. Just as he had once been duped by Kissinger, he was now comprehensively duped by the Israelis. At Camp David Sadat and Carter even thought they could handle ...”

“... When​ the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with all the faux outrage, some genuine incredulity. Why did they take such an insane risk? The subterfuge was so cack-handed – rubbing the ball with lurid yellow sandpaper, perfectly suited to be picked up by the TV cameras – and the potential rewards so slight that they seemed to be putting their careers on the line for next to nothing ...”

“... posture of Alastair Campbell, proclaiming his integrity from some sort of throne against a grand imperial backdrop, contrasted with the BBC employees’ mobbing of their departing director general to give us the two images with which Hutton will now always be associated. It is possible in politics to be too clever by half; this attribute can be found ...”

“... campaign manager, his first national security adviser and his personal lawyer – and precipitated grand jury investigations still going on in Virginia, Washington DC and New York. Also, hadn’t he been pronounced a traitor by James Clapper (former director of National Intelligence) and John Brennan (former director of the CIA)? How much more do you want? It ...”

“... beauties, their colour and light. In the current scene a few of the bad boys – long since turned grand old men – may be Germans (Kiefer, Richter, Baselitz), but, further back, isn’t there something displeasing about older German samplings? Something freakish, astringent, minoritarian, inturned? Say, Dürer, Dix, Liebermann and Nolde. Their canvases have ...”

“... a change. What Cannadine has done is, for the first time, to survey and display the whole grand panorama. Taking the Weberian triad of wealth, power and status as his architectural framework, he traces how the British landed establishment has for over a century slid inexorably from an unprecedented pinnacle in 1870. In that year they were the ...”

“... a fungoid growth or eruption used as an image for the progress of love. A civil servant called David, his grey hair dyed, has come to visit his ex-wife, Stella: he brings with him his new partner, Catherine, but he is already sick of her and obsessed with a third woman, the pleasingly trollopy Dina. David accompanies ...”

“... to gain release from her vows, moved to Paris, and in a startlingly short time became one of the grand literary hostesses of Paris, as well as mistress to the prime minister and several other leading figures. She used her political influence to promote her brother’s career in the Church, and did it so well he ended up a cardinal. Along the way she gave ...”

“... Protestant Ethic, I tell my students, when we come to Weber in my survey course on Sociological Grand Theory. Look at me, I say: Jewish father, Catholic mother – and I develop an allergic rash at the mere mention of the word ‘holiday’, with all its connotations of reckless expenditure of time and money. Accumulate, accumulate! – that’s my ...”

“... he champions a return to what Karl Popper called ‘piecemeal social engineering’, whereby grand schemes are avoided in favour of pragmatic experiment. We know that grand schemes don’t work, although part of what makes us miserable is our hankering for a world in which they might. You can’t have untamed ...”

“... Our experience of Freemasonry is one of the minor peculiarities of the British. From The Grand Mystery of Freemasonry Discover’d (1724) and Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected (1730) to Martin Short’s Inside the Brotherhood: Further Secrets of the Freemasons (1989), the dominant genre in Masonic literature has been the ‘exposure ...”

“... Since​ 1961 more people have gone into space than have raced in Formula 1 Grand Prix. This doesn’t mean that it’s harder to become an F1 driver than an astronaut. But motorsport is incredibly expensive and the pool from which drivers are drawn is tiny. A modern F1 car costs around £10 million to manufacture ...”

“... 14 October, Yves Threard, the deputy editor of Le Figaro, said on the television debate show Le Grand Soir that he ‘hates the Muslim religion’ and once got off a bus because there was a veiled woman on it.On the same day, the president of the centre-right party Les Républicains, Christian Jacob, said: ‘It shocks me that we accept that a veiled person ...”

“... In a characteristically versatile display of cultural, technological and economic history, David Landes looks at the evolution of the clock as a machine, and at the triumph of public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and ...”

“... sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, were preoccupied with the escalating political crisis over Gallipoli. The absence of British naval escorts for the Lusitania in the war zone reflected the ...”