“... with ‘meat, fish, fruit or vegetables’ and fail to mention other ingredients on which a curry may be based, such as paneer, the universal cheese of India?The most striking omission of all from the OED definition is India itself (though the section on etymology notes the word’s Tamil origins: ‘Tamil kari sauce, relish for rice, Kannada karil, whence ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh ...”

“... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and ...”

“... parenting style would bring their son to ‘hit the couch four times a week’ in the office of Dr Richard Lacy. But, then, that’s the point. Just before the end, Shteyngart writes: ‘On so many occasions in my novels I have approached a certain truth only to turn away from it, only to point my finger and laugh at it and then scurry back to safety. In this ...”

“... cakes (and not above stealing and swindling to buy them), not academically gifted. Baker thinks he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended ...”

“... murder, it’s time to sell everything you have. ‘Have you been saving up for a rainy day?’ Richard Gere as the defence attorney asks in Primal Fear. ‘Guess what? It’s raining.’ In the course of his many appeals, Stafford Smith claimed that Maharaj had received ‘ineffective assistance at trial’, but though Hendon had been lousy, legally he ...”

“... to meet them – thus engineering its exclusion. De Soto resigned from the UN soon afterwards. It may seem odd that other EU member states should have acquiesced so readily to the 2003 switch to a militarised solution, but Blair’s approach proved hard to resist. Schisms in the lead-up to the Iraq war had left the EU badly weakened. The instinct of men such ...”

“... his effete literary efforts. The movie – inspired in part by Edward Albee’s Seascape and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and broken up by short quotes from Dostoevsky – has some stilted, uneven fun at the expense of one man’s writerly ambition, but doesn’t question the ambition itself. If anything, writing seems to represent for Franco an ...”

“... was America. ‘It’s true there are some misguided boys,’ the principal said, ‘and they may be the ones threatening us, but it is America that has bombed their homes.’ The list of grievances against America is long: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the civilian death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly in Pakistan itself. I am writing this in ...”

“... mirror – heir, in this, to the Winnicottian mother. Here, and elsewhere, the Anglophone reader may be reminded of the importance of this theme in English literature, as in Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’ (‘My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears’) or Shakespeare’s proto-structuralist joke about infidelity in The Merchant of Venice, when ...”

“... with difficulty, supported by one of his ‘pretty young assistants’. The meeting with Mao may have represented a momentous ‘earthquake in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was hardly the ‘serious and frank exchange of views on Sino-US relations and world affairs’ that would be claimed in the Shanghai Communiqué signed by ...”

“... and Irn Bru, and the great new self-help ethos has had little trouble finding local imitators. It may be an indirect part of Princess Diana’s legacy to the British nation, the success of The Little Book of Calm, but self-help has had its main British impact on television. Trinny and Susannah have just come back with a new series of What Not to Wear, a show ...”

“... is impeachment.The constitution provides that a majority of the House of Representatives may impeach (that is, indict) the president for ‘treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours’. A trial then takes place in the Senate, where conviction and removal requires a two-thirds vote. As on numerous other matters, the constitution is ...”

“... the means.Prospecting a hundred years, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘The London citizen of the year 2000 AD may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of ...”

“... many older folk in the village, apart from Nan Shepherd. She had taught my mother, whose name was May Salmond, between 1950 and 1953 at Aberdeen Training Centre, where students were ‘trained’ to be teachers. The general method of instruction conformed to the norms of the 1950s classroom: students were addressed like children, desks were laid out in rows ...”