“... case of a family who were asked by an army patrol for the loan of a cooking-pot. The soldiers were young conscripts who had been out in the hills for three days. They lent them the pot and gave them two plantains to put in the soup. Next morning the ELN appeared. They took the father of the family, tied him to a tree, and tortured him in front of his wife and ...”

“... like a stock Yiddish character. It is never entirely clear what he is up to. We know that as a young man he moved to Moscow because he was a Communist. But he may have been involved there in something more sinister than tailoring; he may be mad; he may have intended to murder the fashion magnate and fled from a bad conscience. Two American couples are also ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”

“... but by 1930 the increasingly unscrupulous High Command was sufficiently interested in the young man for him to be appointed professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical School. He also gained the support of an eminent military scientist, Koizumi Chikahiko, who fancied himself as a humanist as well as a patriot. His slogan, Sheldon Harris tells ...”

“... much a rich man’s plaything. In 1954, however, it had the good fortune to be bought by a wealthy young barrister who, initially at least, brought to it the same benevolent rule as editor-proprietor that David Astor exercised on the Observer. It was at this stage that Inglis was lucky enough to join it – having leapt on ...”

“... more hitting. Becker, too, wore everybody out, fraying tempers and reducing Bollertieri’s top young prospects (one of them Tommy Haas, the new German hope) to wrecks. Becker hired Bollettieri in 1993, when his career was flagging. What made Becker different was that he was a grown-up: ‘a guy who’s very methodical, a guy who’s very neat, who takes ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... pieces of property owned by Lord Camelford and conveyed to trustworthy nominees. That eccentric young peer brought in his friend Tooke merely to vex the new Addington ministry. Described as ‘very old’, which, at 65, he was for a new MP, Tooke found his election challenged on the grounds, once again, that he was a clergyman. An examination of precedents ...”

“... a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as not to distract ...”

“... accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different kinds, and I should surmise from internal evidence that Bergonzi’s was written earlier. They ...”

“... for the ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional service careers was to a certain extent the result of Britain’s withdrawal from India and other ...”

“... comes into sight again when the ‘outstretched arms mechanically generated from each other’ in David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’ are said to be (or at least have placed next to them, in apposition) ‘duplication which leads through democratic crowds to totalitarian unison’. I thought this was coming it a bit. There are only three outstretched arms in ...”

“... thus the index of intransigent and triumphant counter-revolution. Not surprisingly, a nucleus of young British post-structuralists have drifted towards Marxist activism or have addressed themselves to film rather than literature. Film narrative, given its corporate ownership and diffuse studio origins, has no obtrusive author to deal with. (The early Screen ...”

“... consider the facts without venturing to interpret them. One of the first accounts of Buchenwald, David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire, is rather weak on facts, but offers a welter of interpretations – glorifying the strength and discipline of organised Communism in the camp, yet making the connection with Kafka, Ubu and the ‘absurd’. This ...”

“... and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s ...”