“... during the Second World War Albanian campaign and describe soldiers, as Wilfred Owen or David Jones might, making their way to ‘the place where you don’t find weekdays or holidays, sick people or healthy people, poor or rich’. To possess a sunny disposition may be as much a handicap to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”

“... man, he had long, straight black hair, but the Koizumi of recent years sports a permanent-waved, steel-grey mane covering his ears and tumbling down to his collar, the inspiration of Teruo Nakagomi, a trendy hair stylist in his constituency. Koizumi complements his attention-grabbing coiffure with light-toned suits, ranging from summer casual to a ...”

“... successive ages, each of a thousand years, the first of gold, the second of silver, the third of steel, and the last of iron alloy. Each age represents a decline on the previous one, and the same is true of Hesiod’s sequence, which goes from gold, to silver, to bronze, to iron save that there is an unnamed fourth age, interspersed between the bronze and ...”

“... now had a passport booth, a partially paved footpath around the side of the main road, a payphone, steel benches for those whose identity cards aroused suspicion, and tons of concrete to protect Israeli soldiers. Israeli workers, who were connecting electricity wires to a new kiosk in the middle of the central reserve, went on with their task during the ...”

“... would explore’. The hostile responses that the book provoked when it was published, and which David Cronenberg’s film version reanimated 25 years later, are on this view further evidence of its deep ‘psychological and emotional truth’. The only possible explanation for such fiercely negative reactions, Ballard says, is denial: it’s the classic ...”

“... to be them,’ but she didn’t know how, so instead of that, she ‘made it’ once with David Johansen, the Dolls’ lead singer, and drove the band around, together with their girlfriends, in her father’s turquoise Buick.It was while she was following the Dolls around that Harry met Elda Gentile, who had the idea of forming a band called Pure ...”

“... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The ...”

“... outside the station what seems like a political rally in progress, with trade-union banners and a steel band just leading off towards the crematorium. The crowd entirely fills the Finchley Road and as we trudge along in the hot sunshine the march, ragged, unceremonious and heartfelt, is almost Indian in its disorganisation and spontaneity, with people coming ...”

“... 11.45 a.m. two military helicopters landed outside the army barracks in Târgoviste, a bleak steel town 120 kilometres north of Bucharest built in the brutal style favoured by etc, etc.’ Yet he also provides a continuous, highly readable flow of detail. Some of it is unfamiliar to the general public, if not to the experts who have tunnelled through the ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... of them. The English Protestant distrust of the papist lurks below the surface. Sinister nuns with steel-rimmed glasses create unease. On a visit to an abbey in Excellent Women, Mildred notes ‘a crowd of little black priests’ from a nearby Roman-Catholic seminary. ‘Like a lot of beetles’, her friend Dora whispers.Spinsters, clerics – and gay men, a ...”

“... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...”

“... a major field for contemporary epic and romance. In his really excellent book, After the Raj, David Rubin makes clear, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulties for a novelist of seizing what he can use and handle from that enormous area, and possessing it as his own ‘world’. It is here that the Celtic magic, if it can be conjured up, has its great ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”