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“... a dead bee goes round and round in the coffee the boy has stirred; a white slug is frozen on a wall; a black carafe of wine stands on the table ‘like an axis’ around which the grown-ups are laughing and talking. Repetition and variation have their narrative counterpart, too – and The Question of Bruno isn’t so much a collection of short stories as ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... he believed he was being watched, possibly through a small hole drilled through his bedroom wall from his neighbour’s flat. (He called the police about it and they told him to fill the hole with caulk.) He was questioned by Canadian intelligence, but let go. Still, he was spooked, and in January 2000 he set off to return to Mauritania, via Dakar; on ...”

“... so as to excise the offending jokes, adjectives and colour-phrases. The first breach of this wall of boredom was effected when the Peter Simple column was invented. It was evidently created to accommodate an incorrigibly funny writer who had a regrettable habit of putting jokes in his leading articles – a certain Colin Welch. According to ...”

“... were still cheering contrasts between the old and new regimes. The leftish Australian writer, Richard Neville, was quoted with approval: ‘There is perhaps an inch of difference between an Australia governed by Labour and an Australia governed by the right, but, believe me, it is an inch worth living in.’ Or as Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s spin ...”

“... is the letter rack, a simple arrangement of three horizontal leather straps, attached to a wall, holding in place a bustling miscellany of textual props: in one typical example there is an almanac; a folded newspaper; a dog-eared royal speech; a quill; a knife; a comb; pieces of (‘slightly phallic’) red and black sticks of wax, singed, it ...”

“... doors could be fitted into walls, or the width of the gap between a floorboard and the plaster wall that floated above it. Koolhaas seemed to be trashing the very possibility of architecture, on his way towards the exit. Neither he nor Krier seemed much interested in the physical, material possibilities of architecture. The difference was that while Krier ...”

“... poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in ...”

“... new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule’. In The Discovery of Ottoman Greece, Calis reconstructs Crusius’s efforts to learn about modern Greece from his corner of the Holy Roman Empire. What ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...”

“... by Dr Albert Wojnilower, director and chief economist of the First Boston Corporation, one of Wall Street’s most respected and influential investment banks. The banking industry is imbued with ‘the narcotic addiction of borrowing and the related phenomena of gambling and asset price speculation’, says Dr Wojnilower in Moffitt’s book. ‘The ...”

“... An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture, dating from 1946, of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar – a three-storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tile hat ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... luxury glimpsed on West German television which encouraged Easterners to pull down the Berlin Wall. This was the secret hope at the heart of the Sunshine Policy: that, slowly and at first undetectably, it would infect the North Korean body politic with the virus of information, self-consciousness and, eventually, rebellion. The dungeon in which North ...”