“... time. ‘I only caught a glimpse of him,’ a woman says of a former high-ranking Nazi: ‘white-haired, distinguished, lots of Old World charm, like most surviving murderers.’ The novel was published in Germany in 1985, the year of Böll’s death, and is set in the present, when Cuba and Nicaragua fill the dreams of the European young. Some of the ...”

“... source Where the decked chestnut had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet’s differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam ...”

“... as Mrs Castle’s inability to distinguish between wood and trees came with the publication of the White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ in January 1969. Moved on from Transport to the newly-created Department of Employment and Productivity (but essentially the old Ministry of Labour) in April 1968, she soon became convinced that something had to be done about ...”

“... and expository ends: ‘And now the shadow cast by the cabbage tree at the centre of the white courtyard with the green border must be longer at noon but nobody measures it because it is the late summer that always settles into the hottest and driest weather.’ There is pleasure, too, in the erotic hunts and their culminations, handled with an ...”

“... Russian from the only available textbook, Stalin’s Studies in Leninism. Soon he is wearing the white shirt and red scarf of the Pioneers. The deportations begin: Kapuściński’s father, an officer in the defeated Polish Army, takes to the woods, disguised as a peasant. His mother spends the nights standing at the window, waiting for the NKVD to ...”

“... broad enough to include Charles Masterman, Arthur Ponsonby, Father Bernard Vaughan and Arnold White cannot be dismissed out of hand. It would be implausible to suggest that this relaxation in the moral climate had absolutely no effect on politics. Churchill had the imminent prospect of office when late in 1905 he allowed Cassel to furnish the sitting-room ...”

“... the wounded in hospitals. Sometimes it was too much for him. ‘Suddenly, he whipped out a large white handkerchief and burst into tears. He looked around and said, “Goddammit, if I had been a better general most of you would not be here.” He turned on his heel and walked rapidly out of the door with the crowd of officials scrambling after him. The men ...”

“... parting sinews And he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales. He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes Like a bullock. He always serves me now. I think he knows about my life. How we prefer To eat in when it’s cold. How someone With a foreign accent can only cook veal. He writes the price on the grease-proof packet And hands it to me ...”

“... culture. Or perhaps they are a red-state art form: patriotic, sentimental, hopelessly unhip and white, full of small-town values, at home in suburban high schools. Unlike jazz and film, which gained respectability as pop and TV supplanted their popularity, the musical holds its own lonely place in culture; it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. Raymond Knapp ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Observer have been reprinted, and he is well launched into the second phase ...”

“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”

“... sky, mean freedom. Emotionally, ‘Rocky Acres’ anticipates the attitude familiar from ‘The White Goddess’, who is also to be found on top of a mountain, ‘at the volcano’s head,/Among pack ice’, where         we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and ...”

“... the case, a step that could have led to disciplinary measures. The final decision on this fell to Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time. He chose not to. ‘It was a pretty easy call,’ he writes in Playing to the Edge, his new memoir. He doesn’t describe el-Masri as ‘innocent’, noting his ‘clouded past’, but does admit he was a ‘false ...”

“... refusing to lose sight of the complexity of her own perspective as the daughter of a working-class white Englishman. In the essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her first collection, she wrote powerfully about the ‘horror of the middling spot … this dread of the interim place! It extends through the spectre of the tragic mulatto, to the plight of the ...”