“... 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 ...”

“... for fear of extremist rivals taking over and South Africa falling apart in a murderous civil war. The indefatigable Pik Botha is reported to have pressed the emerging partnership ideology on an ANC dinner partner with the analogy: ‘We are in one boat, and the sharks to the left and the sharks to the right are not going to distinguish between us when we ...”

“... Lisa Anne Gurr combed through Simenon’s Maigret books to confirm that drinks indicate social class and that Maigret drinks a great deal of beer, brandy, wine and coffee; he has herb tea when ill. Anthropologists anxious to examine the habits of their fellow drinkers must be unrelaxing holiday companions. But alcohol – like food, sex and work – is a ...”

“... breakfast at Chiswick House and the hero-worship flared up again. Ten yean later the Crimean War broke out and his hero was the most reviled man in Britain. Notoriously, the ducal Devonshires owned property almost everywhere except in Devon. For decades on end the Duke failed to visit his fine castle of Lismore in Ireland; the heavy spending went on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Greenland had become the highest in the world, and the homicide rate was comparable to that in a war zone. Miss Smilla is a remorseless, unforgettable indictment of this colonial history. In this way Høeg expands his chosen form almost beyond recognition, and it seems only appropriate to learn that there is no word for ‘thriller’ in Danish. Yet Høeg is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Stephen Spender was a visitor to the city of Hamburg both before the war and after, when he played a part in the work of occupation and recovery. He was well on his way to being the noted ex-communist poet, whose lyricism of the left spoke up in praise of pylons and the landing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs, ‘more beautiful and soft than any moth ...”

“... in style and intent than some entire careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if he had others to support, while the employee at $50,000 has a certain level of middle-class comfort. More significant, the potentate at 10,000 or 12,000 scudi a year paid no taxes or death duties and was far less bound by laws of bankruptcy, not to mention modern conventions of fiscal probity. It is hard to imagine any free-spending billionaire of ...”

“... 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 ...”