“... a good example of where ‘environmental sensitivity reinforces national advantage.’ The fourth corner of the diamond is the position of related industries. One industry produces demand for others. A cluster of related industries makes for a stronger base than one that exists in isolation. Japan’s strength in semiconductors helps it in computers. Swedish ...”

“... else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards ...”

“... who coined the phrase ‘romantic irony’ for the artistic apprehension of human duality; John Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we still ...”

“... of the trip, in letters which contained gothic descriptions of his hand-to-mouth existence. To Paul Semonin, probably his closest friend, he wrote of an eight-day river journey through Colombia: The crew is primitive and vicious-looking and the captain is an old river toad who can’t understand why I’m here and doesn’t much care for it. His daughter ...”

“... their politics militant. I claim this to be the first piece about the salience of Scargill, though Paul Routledge of the Times had, it turned out, done a decent report on the election results as they occurred. In a few months such claims were moot. Scargill led a mass picket of miners to the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham, recruited the support of the ...”

“... old film when Zhivago’s heart is described as ‘paper thin’. He thinks he sees Lara turning a corner in Moscow. He struggles to get off the bus, loosens his tie, finally makes it to the sidewalk where, after two steps, he drops dead. Dead chasing love, the thing we would die for. That was my father – stepping not off a bus but out of a shower in his ...”

“... and desolation in the countryside and a swelling mountain of festering litter at every street corner. They saw the end, even for the most renewable resources. One of these was Robert Lamb, who in 1979 published a book called World without Tree. ‘A survey of current evidence,’ he wrote, ‘shows that trees could be so scarce in a mere thirty ...”

“... and I was pulling pints for everyone, loving being the centre of attention. George sat in the corner observing it all. I was putting brandy in my Guinness which was the only way I drank spirits really. It says much for Adams’s resolve and basic physical strength that he was able to play so often so successfully. But it is still surprising, given that ...”

“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a lot ...”

“... tell you the Americans are going to betray us again just as they did in 1975 and 1991,’ he said. Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, has been claiming, somewhat ludicrously, that life in Baghdad is back to normal. An energetic and arrogant man, who wears a smart New York suit with army boots ...”

“... the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current site. Such conventional origins do little to account for the astonishing originality of Mackintosh’s work, its arcane symbolism and outlandish forms, which, combined with a brilliant mastery of functional, three-dimensional space, were ...”

“... imperialist, keener on plundering Spanish bullion ships than on paying for soldiers to carve out a corner of a foreign field three thousand miles away in Chesapeake Bay. James I, king during the Jamestown experiment (the plantation was named in his honour), was similarly minded to give his blessing to overseas projects only if they didn’t cost him ...”

“... Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that ...”

“... was heating up. By contrast, the news on population has been slow to filter through. In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which became an international bestseller and made Paul Ehrlich a fixture on the chat show circuit (he appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than twenty ...”