“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a lively, sociable couple. The fourth member of the party on that bucolic outing was George Tioli, an ‘Italian boy . . . quite a civilised and interesting ...”

“... last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had ...”

“... Mossocks. Across his career Garner has shown an aversion to setting the scene, but in this case it may be a shrewd move. Young readers can impose their own preference, or let the protagonists be the same age without the technicality of twinhood. It’s revealed late in the book that Colin is the taller by an inch, which could mean anything. There’s the ...”

“... nautical uncle) than to those grown-up girls who did not. And even a Treasure Island boy (or girl) may tire of Sahlins’s fecund pun-machine. The fact is that Treasure Island is a pale pastiche of the real, wonderful journals of our navigators and their crews. Take the ‘Private Signals’ for the final voyage, which lasted four years, for use in the event ...”

“... and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who embodied conventionally masculine traits, at least in the ...”

“... a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no attention. In May 1993, 11 months before the extermination of the Tutsis began, I warned that ‘genocide’ was looming. But I also fell victim to the RPF’s manipulation of the press: I wrote about the supposed activities of the so-called Zero Network – presidential death ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... genuine ingredients from Dark Age epic and romance. Nor does it seem improbable that its success may have had some underground influence on other British fiction of the time, however seemingly different. Narrative can make fantasy out of stirring past events, or it can make pseudo-epic. Does J.G. Farrell take the Celtic line in The Siege of Krishnapur, and ...”

“... of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of examples. What may be more significant, Peter Widdowson has for some years edited a journal called Literature and History, which publishes scholarly articles, more dispassionately written and usually more fully documented, on specialist topics such as the historical references ...”

“... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...”

“... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of ...”

“... he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by David Hume.) The praise was sincere, and generous too: a leader of Parisian opinion was offering a leg-up to a young provincial who might easily become his rival. And Camus needed all the help he could get: his paper had folded in 1940, forcing him to seek work ...”

“... business interests. Black senior died in 1976 by falling over the banisters at his home; he may have committed suicide – in any case, Conrad saw it happen. ‘Life is hell,’ the father told the son while they waited for medical attention. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ He died later that night. It’s no surprise to ...”

“... on the Result of Today’s Conference with the State Secretaries concerning Barbarossa’, dated 2 May 1941, just a few weeks before the invasion. It begins: ‘1. The war can only be continued if the entire armed forces are fed from Russia during the third year of the war. 2. As a result, there is no doubt that “x” million people [zig Millionen ...”