“... on this premeditated and systematic degradation of the humanity of an entire population, David Cameron characterised the Gaza Strip as a ‘prison camp’ and – for once – did not neuter this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that ...”

“... about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade. Shadid’s paternal ...”

“... serve as the title for dozens of the stories in this book. A man loses a one-of-a-kind Star of David while swimming at Atlantic City; ten years later, he finds it in an antique store in upstate New York. A woman living in Washington DC is mistaken by a stranger for another woman; years later, in San Francisco, the same stranger bumps into her and repeats ...”

“... resort, watching a young couple having sex. In a set-piece inversion of the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, it is in this case the morally dubious old goat who watches from the dark as his beloved young Zinka (a ballet dancer turned yoga teacher whom he has only recently met) is clumsily ravished by her boyfriend Niko. It is just the first ...”

“... domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history. It may now be the exception in literary and specialist journalism, but at the start of the 19th century it was pretty much the rule – to the extent that France in 1850 legislated to forbid the publication of unsigned articles on philosophical, political and ...”

“... knocked on the classroom door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a politics lesson when David Cameron was declared the new leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was ...”

“... adult life outside the UK (in Poland, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand), which may explain why he has been called a contemporary Graham Greene, an epithet which does him few favours, since his prose has little in common with Greene’s and the moral issues that preoccupy him have nothing to do with Catholicism. His novels include all the ...”

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... onto the floor, picking through the motley treasures between sips from a mug whose tawny contents may have been cold tea without milk. (S)he: I have no idea whether this compromised pronoun represents sensitivity or the opposite, but it seems the best choice of a bad lot. ‘He’ is reductive in one way, ‘she’ in another, and though ‘(s)he’ seems to ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... confronted the Paisley phenomenon have not been entirely immune. More ‘scientific’ terminology may be applied – ‘authoritarian’, ‘fascistoid’, ‘reactionary’, ‘populist’ – but the gain in objective understanding is often more apparent than real. A shortage of hard research data from the grass roots of Protestant Loyalism has led ...”

“... is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a hyper-articulate, decorous Queen’s English that deliberately celebrates the sort of cultures where dialect is ...”

“... Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad ‘a faceless testudo’ takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation ...”

“... out) they are in operation.There are also two romances in play. The first is industrial: these may be the last merchant ships the Clyde ever builds and therefore ‘ane end o’ ane auld sang’ in the phrase used to describe the end of Scottish sovereignty in 1707. The second is Hebridean: the fifty inhabited islands that make their ragged pattern off the ...”

“... War. Hersh wanted the story to speak for itself. He finally gave it to the independent journalist David Obst’s Dispatch News Service. Thirty-six newspapers picked up the story, but the New York Times wasn’t among them; Time, Newsweek and the television networks ignored it. Self-censorship was pervasive. The Washington Post was an exception: the Post’s ...”