“... with the work of Kipling, or Katherine Mansfield. But a story like Nabil Gorgy’s ‘Cairo is a small city’, though still intimately concerned with justice and injustice, employs the magical, repetitive form of the folk-tale to bring Engineer Adil Salim to a sticky end: he perishes as the guilty victim of a ritualised murder, administered by a Bedouin ...”

“... around Watsonville. What about Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm, in which a father and two small boys struggle heads lowered against the blast, the smaller child lagging behind, trying to rub the dust out of his eyes? Again, there is only one parent in the shot: the family is evidently disintegrating. So is the house behind them, a miserable hut of ...”

“... release from prison). The rooms upstairs were brightly lit, but no one seemed to be around. In a small living room we found Winnie Mandela, curled up on a sofa with a young man, apparently in a drunken stupor. We tiptoed out again.Over the years, I met Winnie in professional settings, but also through Alain Guénon and Jean-Yves Ollivier, two ...”

“... at the age of five, when his father offered him as a hostage in a high-risk manoeuvre against King Stephen which won John Marshal control of Newbury Castle during the messy civil war between Stephen and Queen Matilda (Stephen was charmed out of murderous fury when the doughty little boy ...”

“... The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a year ...”

“... by a converse conquest of discourse is deliciously Greenblattian. But in Marvellous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt is dealing with the Spanish conquest of the New World. This time the conqueror’s assurance of superiority is brutally uniform: a superiority of arms, together with a superiority of spirit, consisting in the possession of the True ...”

“... central Middle Ages. Unlike other heretics (but like the Catholics), Cathars were divided into a small leadership of celibates who preached and performed rituals, and a very much larger group of believers. Strictly speaking, the only true Cathars were those in the first category: they had undergone a ritual, the consolamentum, that released the spirit from ...”

“... produce.’ All this makes it very difficult to isolate what exactly it was that turned a small minority of bourgeois men into Freikorps thugs, or even what made a rather larger number of them fascists. Theweleit’s tendency to expand the application of his analysis further and further, his broad, at times seemingly limitless concept of fascism, his ...”

“... in 1899, he split his time between the rich sporting set and the intellectuals, befriending Thoby Stephen, who similarly bridged the two, and many of those who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group. (Bell chased Thoby’s sister Vanessa for years; she agreed to marry him in 1906, on the day of Thoby’s funeral: he caught typhoid while on holiday in Greece ...”

“... her sights on a man who had spent much of his life at court under her father’s guidance: Francis Stephen, who was nine years her senior and inherited the small duchy of Lorraine in 1729. He was persuaded – with some difficulty – to renounce his hereditary rights and the provincial charms of Nancy and Lunéville. In ...”

“... pedagogy. No such contradictions assail the editors of the Longman Exam Guides, who preface Martin Stephen’s English Literature* with the observation that ‘much has been said in recent years about declining standards and disappointing exam results. While this may be somewhat exaggerated, examiners are well aware that the performance of many candidates ...”

“... to know. He had met Denis Thatcher and Mark at an arms fair. He had several times come across Stephen Tipping, Mark’s ambitious and thrusting partner in the defence business. No establishment door was shut to him. Naturally, James was very right-wing. He’d been a disciple, he still boasts, of George Kennedy Young, an MI6 agent who became deputy ...”

“... future. Occasionally there was the odd piece that came to life in spite of it all. I recall a small lithograph (I think it was) where a cool jet of irrigation water arched across the deep dark green of an upland valley, while the sun shone yellow on a plain far below, sparkling with pylons. Two conflicting trends could be seen in the ...”

“... anything better than Yeats’s sickening ‘dream of the noble and the beggarman’. He hated the small towns, with their shopkeepers, as Yeats wrote, ‘fumbling in a greasy till’. The truth is that Synge was never really interested in political issues. As a young man, he much preferred to traipse around Europe, playing his fiddle, enjoying the seasons and ...”

“... all that interested in commercial success, but they were innovative and intriguing, and attracted small, very devoted followings. I once met two students from Nijmegen who had come on a pilgrimage to Manchester because they loved The Fall. They flicked through my record collection and asked me about the band’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, and his ...”