“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both ...”

“... country house in which he is seated on the lawn as one of an assorted company, including John Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Peter Howard and Professor Joad, of prospective Parliamentary candidates. Three years later, when Mosley was starting to move towards Fascism, there were some letters, which are extant, in which my father sought reassurance from ...”

“... for President Bush, who can barely speak for himself, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned that the US Administration is laying ‘the foundation for what is going to be a very long struggle’. The struggle has been long already. Charles Glass Jerusalem Because I live ten blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, my response to the ...”

“... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...”

“... talked to Laborde, I realised how naive my question was. It’s not just that the Saudi Arabia of rice, the Saudi Arabia of prawns and the Saudi Arabia of soya beans are all different. It’s that with staple crops like wheat, there are multiple different grades, varieties and uses, making it hard to compare like with like. There was a more obvious problem. I ...”

“... on the deep soft sofas of his kitchen-sitting room, where he was batch-cooking a week’s worth of rice. He was amiable (except towards immigrants and Keir Starmer), articulate, discursive. He’d always argued about politics, he said, with his father, whom he clearly admired and looked up to. ‘I guess I’ve always been a little bit more right-wing when it ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”