“... of staff of the air force and helped plan Desert Storm. He was a Republican under George H.W. Bush, yet he went on to campaign for the Democratic senator Bob Kerrey and Barack Obama. He leaves drugs out of his list of rivulets because, I’d guess, he was above them. In close-up he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter ...”

“... her again with the crowbar, rapes her, and strangles her with a cord, then drags her body under a bush. Also on 15 March, news breaks that Asarco is asking the EPA for permission to fill with slag another fourteen acres of Commencement Bay. Even when the braiding is more subtle, there’s little in the way of empirical evidence to support the implied ...”

“... of its effects.A few months earlier – in the remoteness of my small town on the fringes of the bush – I had thought, once again: enough’s enough. My doctor (his dusty downtown surgery darkened by eucalyptus trees) seemed disinclined to investigate, though happy to prescribe me stronger and stronger pain relief. Whatever he gave me (and however much ...”

“... incorporating the vast majority of the world’s population. The hope, as expressed by President Bush’s trade representative Bob Zoellick, was that China would become a responsible stakeholder in the global system. Twenty years later, it is the second largest national economy in the world. The US and China are deeply interconnected through trade and ...”

“... which is a sign of how vivid the early traumas remain. She likes both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, and resents Downing Street’s failure to make better use of her as an ‘asset’, but doesn’t notice that the two presidential wives have a clarity to their respective roles that she never seeks in her own. She eventually sees through Carole Caplin but ...”

“... idealists misled by a commitment to liberal democracy. Never mind that the honest idealists in the Bush camarilla were also Saddam Hussein’s major sponsors in the 1980s, or that Blair’s ideals stretched a few years later to selling his services as an adviser to other Middle Eastern and Central Asian dictatorships. The war’s erstwhile supporters remain ...”

“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most fashionable cabaret venues. It was a ...”

“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”

“... traitorous to suggest that suicide bombers are not cowards, and who are comfortable with President Bush referring over and over again to bin Laden as ‘the evil one’. But it is important to insist that questioning the prevailing rhetoric is another and perhaps better way of honouring the dead. An editorial in the New York Times tells us that ‘each profile ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... allegiances bear significant responsibility for a United States ‘increasingly segregated’ (as Peter Shrag recently put it in the Nation) ‘between the winners in the global economy in their highrise offices and their privately policed, gated residential developments and a sort of lumpenproletariat, much of it black or Hispanic, stuck in rotting ...”

“... in squamae or scales. A poem beginning Lobawn, he calls me in shelta, his duck nest Under a thorn bush on a petering-out lane might cause a problem which a note would resolve. Shelta is the jargon of Irish tinkers. Lobawn is probably the Irish loban, meaning mud or mire, though the speaker is a personified ‘Wattle Tent’. ‘Brought to a brumal ...”

“... how Jonathan Power tells it. Amnesty began in 1961, with the simple and apparently absurd idea of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, that governments could be persuaded to release political prisoners simply by ordinary people writing letters to them. This remains the core of Amnesty’s work. Power’s is not an uncritical history. He refers both to the ...”

“... an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher celebrated his hundredth birthday in March, soon after he published this memoir; he must be among the world’s oldest still writing writers, a longevity owed to his combination of a powerful memory for facts (‘Who knows wins’ is a personal ...”

“... an artery in his thigh: ‘I got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit.’ After that came a bush-baby, and after that a ‘baker’s dozen of small, brilliant tropical birds’, but they all died in a fire. Nothing for it, there had to be another otter. So Maxwell acquired Edal. ‘When wet she would pull down a towel, or several towels, upon which to ...”