“... to be spreading, no doubt being seen in high places as a sound qualification for anyone who may now be angling to land a job sorting things out in Iraq itself. The man who has been put in charge of a body called the Iraq Industry Working Group was quoted last week as saying that within quite a short time – as little as three years, he thought – Iraq ...”

“... My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian ...”

“... in order.’ Art remains ‘the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced’. You may think he should have been on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern – and the style – to persuade him momentarily to accept a substitute for the force and beauty of art, something for which he had, on his own account, expressly ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key ...”

“... complex situation, contradicting mythological simplifications, yet showing where the roots of such may be found. Likewise, she confirms, so far as this area goes, the traditional view that lower-class Scots showed an unusual thirst for learning – as when the people of remote Glen Tilt petitioned the 3rd Duke in 1769 for a school convenient for their ...”

“... 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 ...”