“... dismissed most writing about Africa. On one of our car journeys I mentioned Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile, a history of exploration in the area where we were travelling, near Lake Albert. ‘I tried to read it,’ he said. ‘There’s a great difficulty. Moorehead can’t write.’ No one had depicted the Africa he was witnessing, he said. He later said ...”

“... taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ça change ...”

“... is Tammas, the signing-on gambler and lover and leaver in Kelman’s second novel, A Chancer, or Patrick Doyle, the floundering schoolteacher in A Disaffection, who blows into a pair of industrial pipes he finds at the back of a club, captivated and comforted by their moaning. Like all these others, Sammy is the kind of man Kelman can commune with ...”

“... hat that scared the hell out of everyone’; not to mention ‘a simple little pussycat hat in white fur-like material with feathered whiskers and the most seductive blue eyes you’ve ever seen’. Cunningham showed his last collection in 1962: ‘space helmets, sleek and naked of trimming, just pure shape, moulded like the cones of rockets and racing ...”

“... all along; others diagnose a peculiar combination of 1970s New York swamp politics and Southern white supremacy. One thing is beyond dispute: recent months have seen an extraordinary concentration of executive power and an unprecedented weakening, perhaps the outright destruction, of what US civics textbooks once touted as a robust separation of powers. A ...”

“... in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of the white man’ on behalf of Cairo or Moscow: a cynical strategy, the governor muses, since under any revolutionary regime ‘the elephants would be the first to die.’ For the anti-colonial rebels who associate themselves with Morel for publicity ...”

“... translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did ...”

“... sanity of Wilkinson and Townshend. Edwin Meese III sees the danger of over-reaction, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan stresses the importance of governments observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses ...”

“... who led themAlong the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streamsAnd the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region,Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodelsWhere the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.You can see why Longley found himself shaking when he first read it to his wife. The terrible, archaic ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... that I would present myself in the hospital the following Sunday afternoon. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh has a poem called ‘The Hospital’, which begins: ‘A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward/Of a chest hospital.’ This did not happen to me, but it was surprising how quickly the routines of the hospital became comforting and ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its ...”

“... had miscalculated the political fallout. Graham has been trying to reach a deal with the White House over the attorney general’s head, trading Republican support for the closing of Guantánamo in exchange for a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. At stake is not just whether the man known as KSM and his co-conspirators receive a civilian ...”