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“... devices. No doubt there’s much to be said, and not all of it simply wishful, about working-class energies, the fruitful mixing of cultures, the melding of black and white. What strikes the visiting eye is the squalor and the distress. Flying to London from New Zealand, you spend 24 hours in the air. Even with a break of two days in Los Angeles it takes ...”

“... debts. But today a bank overdraft rather than an account in credit seems to be the norm for middle-class people. I remember, when I was ten years old, the horrific impact upon my recently widowed mother when a friend suggested that if she was contemplating financial difficulties, her bank manager would doubtless oblige with an overdraft. Today not only have ...”

“... His earlier novel Dog Soldiers was about the legacy of corruption left to America by the Vietnam War. In A Flag for Sunrise the theme is American incursion into the Third World. The scene is the small corrupt Central American republic of Tecan – fictional in name but in little else. At first we appear to be in Greeneland: at a derelict mission station on ...”

“... is wildly inaccurate to describe the pre-Revolutionary Church as ‘the old religion of a middle-class élite’. Mistakes of this sort are perhaps not very important in themselves, but they undermine confidence. More serious, in view of her argument that David was much influenced by Rousseau, is a certain vagueness about what Jean-Jacques actually said, and ...”

“... single most successful assertion of the British national interest since the Second World War and an excellent example of wise state intervention’ – would gain general assent except in the case of the section preoccupied (as he is not) with the hazards of nuclear power. He talks of integrated transport and energy policies as though he means it. He ...”

“... may be; nor, surprisingly, has it much to say about such current obsessions as race, colour and class. For protagonists of the sex war, however, there is a substantial amount of ammunition, ranging from ‘A maid that laughs is half taken’ (English Proverb) to ‘A woman is occasionally quite a serviceable substitute ...”

“... I was blind, now I see,’ did not show up at all well and were regarded as rather second-class sinners. Philip Toynbee gives himself no airs as a sinner. He is capable of an occasional rhetorical flourish about ‘the stews and gutters of Babylon’ and his own early apprenticeship to drunkenness, gluttony and lust, but the rakehelly ...”

“... of his three blockbusters. Eye of the Needle is set in 1944. There is only one man who can win the war for Hitler, a ruthless superspy who has discovered the Normandy invasion plan. The ‘Needle’ – so called for his penchant for the stiletto as a killing weapon – is a cold-eyed, brilliant and ruthless German aristocrat. He has style and is irresistible ...”

“... National Context to show the limitations of reason within this movement. The needs of the social class within which the movement took place, and of the state within which they lived, put firm preconceptions into their reasoning. So it was entirely consonant with enlightened thought that serfdom should continue in Bohemia, or in the coal works of ...”

“... old friend. He is swamped with memories; of his brother, killed in the Philippines in World War Two; of his mother who never recovered from this loss; of his first wife, missing since the mid-Sixties; of his miserable, angry second marriage and his alcoholic wife; and above all of Drenka, the mistress, the respectable Yugoslavian woman who became an ...”

“... fuzzy; she was a great curser (a message left on my answering-machine at the outbreak of the Gulf War consisted entirely of oaths), but byzantinely courteous – an icily disarming ‘forgive me’ accompanied by a salaam and a chuckle was a favourite introit. She had exceptional verbal acuity but surrounded her trenchancies with long pauses, huge wheezes of ...”

“... the peripheries: ‘its language,’ he asserts, ‘issues from the ranks, not from the officer class. That language rips out of slums, back streets, building sites, workshops and the “sheer plod” of rural drudgery.’ The Irish theme in this reading of Hopkins, instead of rendering the poet ‘irrelevant’ or merely provincial, had the bracing effect ...”

“... Davis lecture followed, rumbling out over the dry Colorado River: on the politics of water and the war between the states, the ecology of the desert, the fragility of the city two hundred miles south-west, the great river and its agonies, infrastructure and capital, the New Deal and class struggle. Consumer society was put ...”

“... fact that the Kaboré regime is new only in name. Like a majority of the population, the political class supported Compaoré’s ‘rectification’ of the Sankarist revolution as long as yearly growth rates hovered around 6 per cent and the regime confined its purges and liquidations to its own ranks. Only when Norbert Zongo, a journalist who challenged the ...”

“... father met his end; the drawn-out death of his young daughter; the loss of a son to the Civil War; the departure of his other son – from the village, from the mountains, from Spain – in search of a modern, middle-class life in the new Europe. This son (whose name is also Andrés, as if ironically to emphasise the ...”