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“... as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-best-sellers such as Patrick Susskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straightforward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English ...”

“... with irrepressible Mitford brio. There’s a high-spirited acknowledgment of help received from Patrick Leigh-Fermor (easily the best of her correspondents) in removing from her MS such campus jargon as ‘on-going’, ‘explicate’ and ‘comedic scenarios’. I only wish he had cut out ‘long-remembered’ and ‘sadly missed’. What’s odd is how ...”

“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”

“... different, of course, on the other side of the theoretical divide. In his comments on the Budget, Patrick Minford, the most determined monetarist around, argues that the Government’s financial and monetary policy is absolutely right. Yet in justifying these comments, and in his discussion of the nature of unemployment, Minford leads us onto the more ...”

“... communication between the two sides with their own spin. By a delectable irony, it took a few white lies and one massive deception to forge trust between the British government and the Provisional leadership. Duddy was primarily responsible for the message of February 1993, purportedly from Martin McGuinness: ‘The conflict is over but we need your ...”

“... ago: we wouldn’t even have been able to distinguish a modern digital signal from background white noise. SETI is maintained, nevertheless, in the hope that we will receive transmissions we can recognise as such. The account of SETI in XTL (a zippy acronym for Extra-Terrestrial Life) is more technically detailed, and lacks Jack&Ian’s scepticism. But ...”

“... the novels, they are pastiche Rider Haggard. Typically, a grand coalition of good guys, made up of white hunters, faithful Zulu warriors and simple but lovable Bushmen, does battle with an evil network made up of urban blacks, Russians, and, oddly enough, on one occasion, representatives of the World Council of Churches. Nevertheless, when Van der Post ...”

“... it had been applied to the human race by W.C. Wells in 1813, and extended to other species by Patrick Matthew in 1831. Darwin hoped, however, to do some service to science by bringing these elements together in a single arc of argument, supported by masses of detailed observations. In the event he never completed the ‘big book’, but in 1859 he ...”

“... forces. Soleimani’s assassination has turned Iranian anger back towards the Great Satan. As Patrick Cockburn explains (in the next piece in this issue), Iran’s leaders were astounded by the millions of mourners who turned out in the streets. Thanks to Trump, a regime that had become increasingly estranged from its own people saw extra­ordinary scenes ...”

“... Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the Seventies with a profound and ...”

“... was losing the war to prolong colonial rule and the US was making preparations to assume the white man’s burden. Lansdale’s influence over the government in Saigon and his forays into rural backwaters made him a legendary figure: he is said to be the model for the idealistic if naive spy in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and in William Lederer ...”

“... The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... William Morris’s Middle Ages, it offered if not an innocent then a simpler world, ‘small and white and clean’, the sort of other Eden with which the English and at times the Scots have consoled themselves ever since they became too powerful as nations to be quite easy in their minds. David’s reputation grew steadily from 1950 and she used her initial ...”

“... what it is rather than using the word unglossed. I could find igloowik only in two places: Patrick William Browne’s 1909 history of Labrador and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that ...”