“... the non-racial project as a naive hoax, a dangerous illusion. Activists in the Congress tradition may argue about whether non-racialism is merely ‘a form that the struggle takes’ (Max Sisulu) or its essential content and objective. Julie Frederikse, a former Harare-based American journalist, firmly declares it an ‘unbreakable thread’. However, the ...”

“... causes of the indifference English critics have on the whole maintained toward literary theory. It may even have served to justify indifference to what Northrop Frye called for, and called ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organised, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main ...”

“... counter-revolution the economic element carries more weight than the cultural one. Mrs Thatcher may not have succeeded in her declared aim of ‘killing socialism’, but some at least of her privatisation, de-regulation and demotion of union rights has come to stay. Indeed Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley are making it increasingly plain that many items of ...”

“... observed it so completely that he returned from Britain to the certainty of a lifetime in jail. It may be, of course, that Slovo was ordered abroad by some secret Party directive: we just don’t know. Everything that followed depended on that derision to leave and yet it is mysterious. There is no doubt that Slovo lived a life of complete political commitment ...”

“... in 1939 the idea of Greece receded further, but what Collins calls Craxton’s ‘private war’ may have been the making of him. He went to the Central School and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly ...”

“... least one chimp (which survived at Lindi for more than two years) came from the Mbandaka area, so may well have been one of Hahn’s west central African chimps. Because cages and play-cages were shared, just one such SIV-infected chimp might have caused widespread SIV infection throughout the colony. So even if Hahn is right, it doesn’t disprove the OPV ...”

“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”

“... during 1967, as Jordan resumed work on the Mukheiba Dam to create a reservoir on the Yarmouk. In May, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran and massed troops on the Israeli border in Sinai. Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt and allowed Iraqi and Saudi troops to enter its territory. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, and six days later ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... of violence and law enforcement, and sometimes of international respect. The public, by contrast, may find them less dreadful – often, in fact, less dreadful than the governments that are supposed to be serving and protecting their citizens. For centuries, pamphleteers have played with the fancy that the greatest thieves and murderers are not those dangling ...”

“... a mention of a ‘magic, incantatory function’. Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never ...”

“... for political education and morale. With this Soviet Polish Army he fought his way to Berlin in May 1945. In June ownership of his division was transferred to Poland, under the Moscow-approved government in waiting of Bołeslaw Bierut, and it was as a member of what was now the Polish Internal Security Corps, the KBW, that Bauman went to Warsaw.Bauman’s ...”

“... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...”

“... What she felt about her war work is impossible to know, but she did it efficiently. Something may be deduced from the fact that, having been an active member of her father’s congregation and of the student Christian Union, she emerged from the war an atheist. The job of political secretary was a perfect fit for her. ‘She was really completely ...”