“... the room for the last few minutes; now he returns with a bottle of arak, a jug of water and live small glasses. Baby cucumbers are produced, along with a selection of unripe peaches as hard as cricket balls. ‘I disagree with Samir, this is not the time to change the intifada,’ says Bashir, keen to rejoin the discussion. ‘During the Gulf War we ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all ...”

“... belied the most beautiful body he had ever seen, a body ‘like Donatello’s David . . . Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back.’ In another four days the ambivalence had returned. He was afraid that she was in love with him and ‘it’s a waste of time trying to discuss ...”

“... al-Jazeera devoted an hour to discussing the conference. The conclusions of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were confirmed. On the eve of Mearsheimer and Walt’s visit to Israel the Israel lobby stood at the centre of political life in the US and the world at large. Why do candidates for the American presidency believe that the support of the Israel lobby ...”

“... from ‘the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House’ – no small achievement for the country that introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East. Was the article intended to prod Obama into taking tougher action against Iran before Israel takes matters into its own hands? Many readers thought so, not least because ...”

“... representation to be decoded or analysed.Jung’s illustrations appear stiff in comparison to two small pictures by the American artist and fisherman Forrest Bess. Bess used a limited palette, just three or four colours per image, without any of the surface pattern associated with cosmic diagrams and none of the overt symbolism. Instead of a tree, he paints a ...”

“... of Collins’s novel is engaging. Bill is a feckless sports hack working on a rinky-dink paper in small-town Middle America. He gets to cover the local baseball team but hard news passes him by: ‘television is where it’s at these days. The written word is dead.’ He loses interest in his job – ‘I was like a goddamn baker selling day-old ...”

“... of Southern California’s autumn mini-hurricanes, the Santa Anas. In October 1991, they turned a small grass fire near the Caldecott Tunnel in the Oakland Hills into an inferno that killed 25 people and destroyed nearly four thousand homes and apartments. In a post-mortem on the Tunnel Fire, the historian ...”

“... have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a spot just outside the Kerrera marina, so it was in full ...”

“... a heist movie, but it’s too slow for the genre, and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the ...”

“... pattern of avalanches is also important. Unsurprisingly, there will be fewer large ones than small ones, but Bak claims that the distribution will obey a theoretically significant ‘power law’, the simplest form of which would have the number of avalanches inversely proportional to their size. Bak discerns this pattern of behaviour emerging from ...”

“... The story is to be continued, presumably, but I can’t see this ‘Dance ...’ catching on. Stephen Wall’s first novel Double Lives is a strange, enfolded book, similar to Motion’s in its use of layering but considerably more subtle in the way it yields up its narrative key. It takes quite some time – nearly the whole book, in fact – for the ...”

“... of civic pride, its construction was often characterised by corruption, parsimony, ineptitude, small-mindedness, infirmity of purpose and division of opinion. Architects had to be strong-willed to stay the course and some, like Hansom, who was bankrupted by the building of Birmingham town hall, lacked the necessary force of character. Only the luckiest and ...”

“... cargoes); it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as Stephen Taylor’s subjects did – but few of those who write about seamen have ever gone aloft on a dirty night to lay out on a yard and hand sail. There is at least one modern authority (Sam Willis) who deliberately went to sea in square rig to learn the trade ...”

“... that Darwinian competition will bring market society to ‘the point when all we have left is a small handful of especially talented people who can create and operate the newer technologies’. The identity of the ‘we’ in this phrase is worth pondering. The deregulation campaign of which he was such a prominent cheerleader may have been only a precursor ...”