“... English reviews. It is unlikely that this situation can change. Ireland, with a total population, north and south, of under four million people, is a land which offers international and native authors a tax-free haven but has not yet managed to provide its poets and novelists with a taxable income. Unlike other former British Dominions such as Canada and ...”

“... But then again, he thinks, perhaps he’s wrong, and anxiously calls the next chapter ‘North Korea?’ He also suffers from mood swings. We leave him ‘weeping, weeping, weeping endlessly’ before encountering him the next day, right as rain: ‘This morning at four thirty, it’s a pleasure to settle back in on my zafu.’Yoga, he feels, gives ...”

“... Romania, for example. The problems were forcefully pointed out by the troops on the ground when John Major went to visit them in Kuwait after the war. He said that Options for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to ...”

“... Back in the 1960s, when I was studying to become a Sufi saint in North Africa, my Sheikh told me to read the Koran again and again, stopping only for prayers, meals and sleep. At that stage in my life I had only the most elementary knowledge of the background to the Koran. Equally crucially, I had no knowledge of, or access to, the vast body of exegetical literature developed over the centuries to explain it ...”

“... could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even ...”

“... eat my hat. Act One: Little Eunice Waymon, a piano prodigy according to her teacher in Tryon, North Carolina, destined to be the first internationally celebrated black classical pianist. She lived in a hard-working family; her mother was a Methodist minister, her father a handyman before becoming a preacher and then an invalid. Eunice’s talent was ...”

“... theme. His was the biggest Democratic victory since 1964. Yet in Florida, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, all of which he won, Obama lost among white voters.* In each case he won these states because he won massive majorities of the black and Hispanic votes (95 per cent and 67 per cent ...”

“... are kept down, but Frayn takes us inside, backstage, closer to the noises off. He also trawls the North London streets where his parents started out, trying to get a measure of his origins and to work out where to place himself – or his young self – socially. ‘Lower-middle class’, the answer he usually gives when asked, is an over-simplification. The ...”

“... they were never going to be able to penetrate the narrow alleyways of the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they didn’t even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing an attack in one place, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other city and town where their forces are strong. Local ...”

“... the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle Peter for a while appointed himself the very man who would, as he delicately put it, ‘get all that poofy shite oot his heid before it really does him some damage’. Game on. But not for long. Uncle Peter arranged to ...”

“... of the country when ‘sovereignty’ is passed to the Iraqis. A loyal secret police, says John Pike, a military expert in Washington, means ‘the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set.’ It will ‘reign but not rule’. Meanwhile, power will largely remain with what is now called the Coalition ...”

“... the Andy Warhol Museum on Sandusky Street, where Andrew Warhola was born in 1928. As the director John Waters has said, every kid needs someone really bad to look up to, and the Warhol legacy carries on that counter-cultural role for a new generation. The museum recently organised an exhibition of the prison photographs from Abu Ghraib. In rural West ...”

“... family in Portsmouth. It is worth remembering that these were the years when, further to the north, Wordsworth was fascinated by starving children, beggars, aged shepherds and broken veterans of the French war. Copeland, whose essay in Jane Austen in Context is accompanied by others of comparable value and interest, turns up again as the editor of Sense ...”

“... The novelist Dorothy Richardson, a film critic for Close Up, saw women with infants at a cinema in North London on a Monday afternoon in July 1927, their ‘faces sheened with toil’, ‘figures of weariness at rest’. The notion that the cinema might be a sanctuary for mothers persists in the current fashion for weekday mother-and-baby screenings – though ...”

“... and a maelstrom of demolition and construction surged on our doorstep. The whole of the area north and east of Liverpool Street Station was slowly engulfed as Broadgate, a Leviathan even among London’s new mega-developments, advanced nearer and nearer. I would wake to find that there was nowhere to buy dinner that day; the local butcher’s and a row ...”