“... entirely appropriate. Thus rechristened, O’Faolain did all the things an ambitious half-poor young man should do. He joined the IRA. He took to speaking Gaelic with a will. He spent his holidays in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) of West Cork. He entered the dreamworld of racial and national purity, which, for an urban, Anglicised policeman’s ...”

“... to the benefit of all expeditions to this day.) More important, in 1988, a British climber, Stephen Venables, lived to tell of the night he spent out on his own after climbing an uncharted route by the East Face, without oxygen. The second doubt took no account of ‘summit fever’, or the effects of altitude on people’s judgment. Even before the ...”

“... least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made ...”

“... however, could well be part of Pinckney’s strategy. For his book is all about the attempt of a young black man to define himself, not according to roots or background, but as an autonomous agent on the stateless terrain of the free-floating émigré intellectual. High Cotton is Darryl Pinckney’s first novel, and it is obviously a book which has taken ...”

“... al-Jazeera devoted an hour to discussing the conference. The conclusions of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt were confirmed. On the eve of Mearsheimer and Walt’s visit to Israel the Israel lobby stood at the centre of political life in the US and the world at large. Why do candidates for the American presidency believe that the support of the Israel lobby ...”

“... reliable sources. Goldberg is also a passionate supporter of Israel: he went to live there as a young man, served with the IDF in the Occupied Territories, and writes a blog for the Atlantic that has made him an influential figure in American Zionist circles. One would never guess from his piece that, despite its support for militants in Palestine and ...”

“... a great deal of contrasting art photography – by Luc Delahaye, Agata Madejska, Simon Norfolk, Stephen Shore, Shomei Tomatsu, Jane and Louise Wilson and many others – in skilful juxtaposition.) McCullin reappears later in the show, this time photographing in Berlin in 1961 as the Wall is erected: curious US troops peer over the new barrier. This sequence ...”

“... accompanying podcast series covers plant intelligence, the Amazon pharmacopeia and ecologist Stephen Harding’s concept of ‘Gaia alchemy’, which seeks to access the intelligence of the earth through meditation and shamanic ritual. To address the climate disaster, Harding urges, we first have to heal the split between science and rationality. One of ...”

“... Another student also observed, again to Gregory, that ‘in China, the old do not like the young.’ Too sweeping, no doubt, but worth a moment’s reflection. Most of the time, though, the reader is kept firmly in Touristland – as were the authors by Mr Lin, their kindly but masterful guide. To make up for this, Spender works a trifle too hard at ...”

“... the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of ...”

“... develop, and to earn some of the wealth that industrialised nations now possess. Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks’s book, the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China, makes clear that there is hunger in Africa for a new partner. Though they are cautious about the negative impact of China’s rise, and wary of the way China treats its ...”

“... me. ‘And, frankly, does anyone in Paris still care? As for the Africans, the majority are very young. For them, France is just another foreign country, when it’s not a convenient scapegoat for their many woes.’ Bourgi’s Françafrique, by tacit admission, is a Potemkin village. A general I spoke to recently in Paris – a figure whose long history of ...”

“... on these two books about judges are a good place to start. The first carries a photograph of a young man who appears to have found a circuit judge’s robes and half-glasses in the dressing-up box and put them on wrong. The second carries a photograph of four Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which ...”

“... people like me directing films, I would do anything. Working with Karel was special. Just so nice. Stephen Frears (film director): In 1965, I was working at the Royal Court in London, which was a bit like being on call to the Borgias, a place full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His ...”

“... standard life, by Conyers Read, is in two volumes (published in 1955 and 1960), each larger than Stephen Alford’s new book. Alford, the author of The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis (1998), has chosen to focus his study on the controversial subject of the Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart always claimed she was the ...”