“... not been reinstated; the economy is a mess; and the US Air Force has started dropping bombs on the North-West Frontier Province again. Poor Pakistan. Forty-five per cent of the electorate voted in the election, more than expected, though the figure was much lower in the Frontier Province, where the spillage from the Afghan war discouraged voters from braving ...”

“... when the dominant Di Lauro clan faced a schism in the depressed suburb of Secondigliano, two miles north of central Naples. ‘To follow the feud I’d managed to get hold of a radio capable of picking up police frequencies. So riding my Vespa I’d arrive at the scene pretty much at the same time as the squad cars.’ Saviano stays glued to that radio night ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... his other side, a sculpture of a floating, veiled female figure, reminiscent of the neo-baroque of North Italian cemeteries; there are Japanese ceramics on the chimney piece, and a Roman bust high above the mirror. Surely he was an art lover, or wished to be thought of as one, but he was devoted to art that Clark’s friends Berenson, Duveen and Fry would have ...”

“... her, she expresses a ‘horrified giddiness’ at moving into a house near the slums of Boston’s North End. His father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, a naval officer until his wife forced him to retire, is bland, impotent, empty, an ‘“unhistoric” soul’ whose death is ‘abrupt and unprotesting’. Lowell himself is a ‘churlish’ brat with an ...”

“... called James Reeves McCullers, Jr. They married when she was 20 and he was 24, and set up house in North Carolina. The detail that somehow sticks with you is that she wore knee-high socks to the wedding. At first glance, Carson and Reeves seem like the last people who should have entered into a heterosexual covenant. Despite Carson’s remark that Reeves was ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... biography, Travels over Feeling, the 15-year-old Russell is already referring to Walt Whitman, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg (prefiguring later, more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over ...”

“... and the social. Bobby’s diving, his wanderings along the Gulf Coast and his roamings around North America offer great scope for McCarthy’s powers of description. Underwater in the wrecked plane, Bobby ‘kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away. Everything that could float was ...”

“... so much to the Americans). Even ‘poor old Notters’ (Alan Clark on the defence secretary John Nott) comes out of it quite well. This is a highly empathetic account of the British campaign, but Freedman doesn’t pretend otherwise. ‘It has expressly not been my task,’ he writes at the start of the second volume, ‘to highlight the failures of ...”

“... on the Mexican-American border, and Shirin Neshat’s use of Iranian imagery in a film shot in the north of Mexico. But most extraordinary of all was the work created by Multiplicity, a Milan-based group of architects, TV producers, photographers, urban planners, geographers, sociologists and film-makers. They created a video installation with nine TV ...”

“... put an end to this effort. The Lost Cause soon became deeply entrenched in American culture, North as well as South. As Slotkin points out, the Myths of the Frontier and the Lost Cause were ‘mutually reinforcing’. Both were premised on the necessity of rule by white Americans over non-white peoples, at home and overseas.More than in his previous ...”

“... who was also a fascist; next, as her stardom dawned, a Hollywood screenwriter; then an actor, John Loder, father of her two children; next, a nightclub owner; a Texas oilman; and finally her own divorce lawyer. She spent her last three decades alone. In Florida, where she died in 2000, her most ‘enduring’ friendship, according to Barton, was with a ...”

“... and school and family discipline, and her pledges to reform the trade unions, all went down well north of the Trent. Hall likes to call this ‘authoritarian populism’, by which he appears to mean a kind of constitutional fascism by consent, but to me it is much more recognisable as the small-town, shopkeeper conservativism amid which I grew up not long ...”

“... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...”