“... Most soldiers found Sudan a lot less poetic than the journalists did. Travelling with the Suakin Field Force in 1885, de Cosson discovered that ‘whirling sand … penetrates everything – eyes, nose, ears, clothes, watches and boots, mixing with the water one drinks, and the bread that one eats, till it grates like cinders between the teeth.’ Nothing ...”

“... or deter an advancing enemy, but as their ability to sustain themselves in the open increased, field fortification became more important than walls and castles. Whatever space a mobile army occupied in the 19th century was turned into a temporarily fortified area by means of trenches and other obstacles. In 1862, A.T. Mahan listed the principal kinds of ...”

“... not faceted to demonstrate real structures, but the better to absorb the dismembered parts in the field. In the maturity of Cubism, human figures and implements, having crystallised into angular planes, began to break up; the facets disengaged, tipped and quivered into the thickening ground. The old hollow-space of narrative painting closed in. Pictorial ...”

“... of the name possessing a vague penumbra of associative hints and suggestions (‘Francis’ = ‘frank’, ‘French’; ‘Ponge’ = ‘sponge’, ‘spongiosity’ etc). More revealing, Derrida argues, is the effect of these names taken together, treated as a compound signifying term. In the play of sense opened up by this chance conjunction of names we ...”

“... plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have made real ...”

“... it was to do? He solved that problem by engaging three Kingsmen, F.E. Adcock, Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch, who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the Classics and Ancient ...”

“... is a persuasive rehabilitation; none of the chapters is without memorable insights. We learn that Frank Capra, for example, is not the populist he is supposed to be: ‘His politics are . . . a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige.’ Keaton is not a rebel or a clown but a person who discovers that ‘setting up residence in the world’ is much harder than ...”

“... and the Lille plan looked back to urban models (such as the Broadacre City concept of Frank Lloyd Wright) that also ‘imagined nothingness’. Perhaps Koolhaas sensed that the new economy of media and communications might not abet a further dissolution of the city, its final death, as architectural futurists such as Paul Virilio had forecast, but ...”

“... rugby based on kicking for three-quarters of a game suddenly throwing the ball around the field as though it were a hot potato. What they are doing is throwing away their principles, too, because if you believe in a kicking game, then adhere to that. Don’t just switch to a totally different style only because you are behind and in trouble. What sort ...”

“... sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged towards Brulard’s preferred self-image. Meanwhile, as our passion for unexpurgated details about our heroes intensified, another motive for autobiography emerged: the pre-emptive strike against would-be ...”

“... time for some second thoughts. Graeme Souness has written, abetted by Bob Harris, an unusually frank football book.† Formerly of the Liverpool midfield and now of Sampdoria, Souness has long been a target for the sympathies and antipathies of many thousands of people, and it shows. What he has to say will come as a surprise to connoisseurs of ghosted ...”

“... before Christ was crucified. Yeats came to O Rathaille, or to this line of his, with the help of Frank O’Connor. Introducing O’Connor’s name, John Jordan introduces a writer who won a particular fame as a translator of Irish as well as a more widely acknowledged renown as a short-story writer in English. The translator has been of extraordinary ...”

“... migration to the mode of Helliconia Spring, his first Tolkienian novel. The novelist is always frank about his ambitions. He is quite prepared to take advantage of a handy centenary to compare his work to Joyce’s, as he did in print a few weeks ago. In a recklessly chin-leading pre-publication advertisement for Helliconia Spring, entitled ‘The Making ...”

“... a proverb that made local sense – ‘better to fatten one pig than feed five’. Listen to a field hand describing Monéys’s final moments: he ‘flailed his arms and legs and made sounds like the noises a hog makes when you stick a knife into its neck’. Once the victim had been bludgeoned with the clubs that they used to stun animals, and his body ...”

“... première of The Birth of a Nation and after the respectable citizens of Cobb County lynched Leo Frank. (Stirred up by anti-semitic hysteria, an Atlanta jury wrongly convicted the Jewish pencil factory manager of molesting and murdering a white female employee.) Atlanta was the headquarters of the powerful Twenties’ Klan, which augmented the negrophobia of ...”