“... against extreme forms of doing has persisted, and these talented Indians have acceded to it. This may be why, with the help of a certain post-Imperial nostalgia, they are so much admired in Britain. The first nine Booker Prize winners included four novels by Indian novelists, or novels about India, or, failing India, other parts of the old Empire. Of the ...”

“... of such poems is their refusal to be purposeful; they are poem all through, so to speak. This may be one reason reviewers frequently called him ‘a poet’s poet’, that consoling phrase so many versifiers reach for while pondering their annual royalty statements. Certainly Justice never achieved widespread popularity, though he won the Pulitzer Prize ...”

“... per cent of the last vote for the governor’s office, an effort that initially floundered. But in May 2003, Congressman Darrell Issa of San Diego started his own recall effort, with a view to becoming governor himself, bankrolling the petition drive with $1.3 million of his own money, or at least what he claimed was his own money. What had begun as a quixotic ...”

“... to be an outsider, as not sharing a common identity. Thrown into the company of strangers we may turn inward, out of fear, or indifference, or the belief that only in that way shall we find our ‘true’ selves; or we may turn outward, anticipating interactions that offer neither a sense of wholeness nor comfort in ...”

“... May and June are the worst months to visit Pakistan: temperatures in Lahore can go up to 120°F, and I still remember the melting tar on the road, which virtually doubled the time it took to bike home from school. I had been invited, however, to give the Eqbal Ahmed Memorial Lectures in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi ...”

“... documents are torn, pitted and worm-eaten. Abruptly, right in the middle of a word, the text may just break off. Modern science offers some help: the binocular microscope, infrared light, the digital scanner and multispectral imaging have all been used to sharpen abraded or worn ink. Even so, making sense of the straggling columns of blotched and broken ...”

“... a bloody deed. Oh yes, the hither-thither razor zips from crown to culet! Quite so. But what may be said of the bullet, which has struck the windowframe, just here? What of the extra glass, and the shorn-off fire iron? The facts, now, just the facts. We have a body, and a murderer. Who, then, was our third drinker? Who is our guest, who smokes ...”

“... of a present spume spattered up the sands? Mind where you pick your mussels and kina, these tides may secrete indigenous toxins. Deadly to the text. Shall I copy it ...”

“... joyful woman driver Insouciant at the wheel of a Detroit-built Hudson, her glance Thrown devil-may-caringly through its rear window, Male passenger watching her high heel pushing eagerly Up away into the ...”

“... don’t even know the date of your birthday.Instead of cycling, we could take a stroll:The clouds may look threatening but any boomsWill be fighter jets on training runsAnd if it rains we’ll take shelter in the woods.First let me take you round the orchard.See where the bark has been stripped from the pear?You thought I was teasing about the muntjacBut I ...”

“... In New York City I wasn’t told That mid-May nights in Vermont can be cold. Outside, our brook, short of sun And wind, barely keeps up a run, Just jogs and limps so as not to freeze; Flexing her black tender knees, The mare between the moon and the gate Crops fiercely as if she couldn’t wait For the calories to turn to heating, And is blindly warming herself by eating; Overhead, chipmunks shiver in rows, Or heaps, or whatever racial pose Chipmunks adopt; if there were lights, The woods would be circus-crammed with sights – Hedgehogs on inchmeal expeditions, Toads in cool conjugal positions, Somewhere the bug that bit me lying Jubilant with my blood and dying, Jays, if you can imagine it, keeping Quiet, drops from bathers creeping Back to huddle inside the lake, And in the corridors where the snake Exerts his snakiness unmolested The hiss and wriggle being rested ...”

“... for the larger world of things it won’t be easy to love. Helen I think will master it, though I may not. She has practised a long time learning to see. I have devoted myself to affirmation, when I should have kept my eyes on the ...”

“... good does it do you To complain, Charles? The fates shuffling your cards Are old and blind. You may as well look for them In every nursing home in Tennessee. One day your car breaks down Outside some dead mill town With a couple smokestacks in the rain, And you trudge past the home With your gasoline can in hand Almost brushing against the grey bricks Just ...”

“... on the inventory of that institution – is covered, and the state hoping to recover its property may have to pay compensation. These strict requirements contrast strongly with the sweeping rhetoric of the rest of the convention. As Patrick O’Keefe has shown, this formulation was insisted on by the US delegation, which refused to sign unless it was drafted ...”

“... a fog of grappa and obsession, Lynch sets about befriending ugly Anna, while suspecting that she may be in cahoots with her mother, the blonde contessa, and possibly also with the rival art historian. In a leather trunk covered with dust, concealed in a hidden room in Mawle House (don’t groan: the art-hunt novel is a sub-species of Gothic, in which the ...”