“... had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces. In March 2011 mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds ...”

“... in the great theatre of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society.’ Over time, the stories of the children she interviews form one larger story. The majority of the children are escaping gang violence. Someone begins following them home from school, or leaving threatening ...”

“... of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter ...”

“... Robert Nichols’ or ‘Letter to S.S. from Mametz Wood’ Graves explicitly figures poetry as a means of temporarily blocking out the terrors of combat. Graves’s other means of escape from the brutalities of both school and the battlefield were his romantic feelings for a boy three years younger than himself whom he ...”

“... veils’. At her best, she combines religious mysticism with visual clarity as dramatically as David Jones – though one feels she would be at her best more often in a lower key. Carolyn Forché, like Stainer, tackles some very ambitious subjects. In fact, throughout The Angel of History we find nothing but ambitious subjects – Hiroshima, the ...”

“... still young, on a day he remembered less well than the day his pet dog died. The family had few means and the young Slovo left school at 14. He joined the Party as soon as he could and it became his family: the affectionate pictures he paints of the characters of the Jewish Left are recognisably family portraits, such as that of the Trotskyist ...”

“... As he delicately puts it, ‘the ANC’s contribution to the UDF would often be debated.’ Which means that both the ANC and UDF indignantly rejected the Government’s claim that the UDF was an ANC front. It was, of course, a complete accident that the UDF had been launched straight after the ANC in London had proclaimed 1983 ‘the Year of United ...”

“... what’s the difference?’) This inarticulateness seems to create a need for other means of resolving conflict, so that once I caught myself thinking that if these Americans speak English like a second language, perhaps guns were their first language. A steady diet of television’s sentence fragments doesn’t help: complex thoughts require ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And Saturday turns out to be a soliloquising novel of urban experience in a similar ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... The book reveals that the army had an official expression for its behaviour: mitzuy ishur, which means ‘eliciting authorisation’. In an interview late in his life, Dayan described Israel’s tactics against Syria as constant ‘provocation’. Needless to say, Dayan himself had become a hero in the 1950s for acting in exactly this way. A similar pattern ...”

“... showmanship in this ‘hyperbolical’ performance to a captive audience, most of whom had little means of knowing what they should pay or whose services they might best employ.The hermitage was calm by comparison. It had begun life as a refuge from plague but by the 1820s was in effect an inn staffed by a number of ‘hermits’ who provided food and drink ...”