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“... develop, and to earn some of the wealth that industrialised nations now possess. Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks’s book, the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China, makes clear that there is hunger in Africa for a new partner. Though they are cautious about the negative impact of China’s rise, and wary of the way China treats ...”

“... throw episodes you would rather have forgotten. But the Profumo case, which should be called the Stephen Ward case, will not go down. The longer it is around, the uglier it gets. It is a shocking story, which will continue to discredit its participants, all the more so for as long as they pretend, like Lord Denning, that there was no injustice perpetrated ...”

“... There is nothing enigmatic about Stephen Vizinczey. He has views, he shouts, cajoles, threatens and sneers. He worships Kleist and Stendhal, loathes William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical conclusions from his insights ...”

“... model is L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Like Hartley’s narrator, Leo, Frayn’s protagonist, Stephen Wheatley, is tormented by a schoolboy code prohibiting sneaking, blubbing and emotional expression in general. Leo is bullied by ‘Jenkins and Strode’, Stephen by ‘Hanning and Neale’. Both boys worship the family ...”

“... it doesn’t equip us with any obvious answers when we stand back and ask ourselves how mere marks on paper or sounds in the air can embody and convey meaning. A similar difficulty arises if we ask how a configuration of lines and colours on a plane surface can possibly succeed in depicting a man or a battle, a forest or a god. Indeed, once we are struck ...”

“... been not a moral crusade but a calculated move to exploit a ‘market gap’. Or so I learn from Stephen Glover, originally foreign editor of the daily and later editor of the Independent on Sunday, whose book Paper Dreams* is a cross between a company report and W.E. Johns, a venture-capital story for boys: three fellows have a terrific wheeze which earns ...”

“... to the stratification of social power and prestige and to the differentiation of accent that marks it. Spoken and written, the tone has the timbre of authority, of those who alone understand the causes of things – and control them. The Oxbridge accent of the White Paper is unmistakable, just as the spoken words of Sir Robert, now Lord Armstrong, are ...”

“... of their companions. There were holes in the road blasted by artillery shells, and countless pock-marks in the masonry. Everywhere, piles of rubble – bricks, of course, but also fragments of cars and of barely identifiable domestic appliances left to rot in the sun. I walked for half a mile across this dead city, past the wildly-skewed telegraph poles and a ...”

“... of Florence and Normandie, the eye of last year’s disturbances, where a neat grid of ash marks out where single-storey homes and businesses stood. Over the murmur of the disc-jockey on KGFJ, there’s the pop and rumble of a clotted engine; it could be an out-board motor. A mauve Buick, its fins twisted, its radiator concave, barrels up alongside me ...”

“... over the ability of regimes to grant themselves or their nastier predecessors amnesties, marks a strong move to qualify national sovereignty in the interests of humanitarian standards; a move tellingly resisted in regard to its own citizens by the United States, whose long-arm jurisdiction is regularly used to try citizens of other states. Frontiers ...”

“... Madhouse, although it has its origin in a drawing made ten years earlier, sustains the urgency of marks made by a committed observer. In Charles Sheeler’s view of the blank side of the Delmonico Building, neat ruled lines and even shading in chalk emulate the crispness of his architectural photographs and paintings. In Thomas Hart Benton’s evocations of ...”

“... have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone also resorted to ‘far go’, but won higher marks by extending his ‘argot’ to embrace ‘embargo’. For all his ingenuity, however, the Grand Old Man did not use ‘farrago’, a term which Daphne Bennett’s new biography shows to have been singularly apposite. Although Margot wrote no fewer than ...”

“... shows a phalanx of unpainted male prostitutes, leaning on some railings. Watching for a cab, Stephen Fry’s Wilde makes eye contact with one of them. ‘Looking for someone?’ asks the lad (identified as ‘Rent-boy’ in the closing credits), and Fry stares helplessly across the street. Gilbert does all he can to italicise the moment, but since Fry ...”

“... of the English state. Both rest their weight on an individual whose life story is full of question marks. There is no tidy box of historical explanation into which we can put him. The brisk judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper was that Cromwell ‘was a freak in English history’. It has always been easier to fall back on broad-brush assertions or to dismiss him ...”

“... of the form prevail, and person is inevitably upstaged by plot. Michael Dibdin’s Vendetta marks the reappearance of Aurelio Zen, the Venetian cop who cleared up an unsavoury kidnapping in Ratking (Gold Dagger Award, 1988), where the unsparing exposé of depravity among the powerful of Perugia was matched by a command of local detail that became almost ...”