“... desire to score points is the only conceivable reason for reading The Man without Qualities. It may be that these views belong only to Madeleine, who can’t imagine any sensible person really believing in all this stuff. But Eugenides never allows us to see it as anything but a pose. It’s in the nature of this kind of theory that its worth can be ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”

“... is much better, muscular and panoramic, but it lacks the surprise details and sense of outrage of David Peace’s treatment in his great miner’s strike novel, GB84.* Welsh makes his political points more effectively through his storytelling. Renton and Sick Boy move to London and live in a filthy towerblock in pre-gentrification Hackney – ‘the London ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... American politics is propelled by laws quite different from any known in Europe. A great deal may be traced back to the elections of the 1960s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in their study Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions (1999), found that the old religious split between voters was deepest in 1960, as ...”

“... escaped from a prison camp and joined a band of Italian partisans during the Second World War. David Storm Rice, an expert on Islamic metalwork, had an affair with Clara Malraux, fought as a commando in Ethiopia and, after a distinguished career as an art historian, suffered a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. Robin Zaehner carried out dangerous ...”

“... resolution of the paradox the harem presents in relation to sexual appetite: although the seraglio may contain many women, coupling is, by definition, done in pairs and stamina sets a limit on serial or collective performance. She sees in the blissful, figure-cushioned interior he has assembled (much of it from other paintings, not all of them his own) a ...”

“... of fashionable sensibility perhaps; of some of the less palatable elements in her background she may have been unaware. She may never have known that her 16-year-old ‘cousin’ Joseph, who appeared in the Kauffman family in 1750, travelled with them for some time and then drifted away again to pursue a much less ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns ...”

“... who has wondered whether the history of the United States can be forced into a Thatcherite mould may well find the book of interest. Johnson announces at the outset that he comes to American history ‘completely fresh’, with no qualifications other than a love of the country and a willingness to immerse himself in the literature of its past. It’s true ...”

“... I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short Stories, 1986-95. Dunmore was not included, which I thought a puzzling ...”

“... Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In this privately-sponsored Olympic Games that wore the face of American nationalism, did the global Olympic village have an enemy guarding its gates ...”

“... In many ways Thompson’s books always carried his readers a little further into pulp-amorality-may-hem than they may have been prepared to go. Certainly his books never failed to deliver those goods touted on the garish tricolour covers: women trussed up on the floor after a beating, or buxomly offering bottled liquor to ...”