“... the death of her husband she spent most of a decade abroad (a good deal of it as a teacher in North American universities) chanting over to herself with satisfaction: ‘I’m no longer in New Zealand.’ What these writers gained from being New Zealanders, I think, was the same in each case – the lack of any profoundly etched social identity, so that ...”

“... O’Rowe, which first aired in 2020. One of the reasons the TV series bettered the novel, I think (Paul Mescal aside, come on), was that the ending was more realistic. In the final episode Marianne tells Connell, who is considering studying in New York, that they’ll be all right. In the novel, she says she’ll ‘always be here’. There is some ambiguity ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... Great Basin, so called because its scanty water doesn’t drain to any sea, is mostly a terrain of north-south-running ranges, sharp-edged raw geology, separated by flat expanses of sagebrush. In the desert, plants grow further apart to accommodate the huge root systems they need to collect enough water to live, and so do communities and ranches. Few but the ...”

“... Archer died with a heart more loyal to the fledgling Church of England in America than to Pope Paul V or the Virgin Mary. It’s even possible that his primary identity wasn’t religious, but that of an English adventurer and trusty servant of the king in Whitehall. Uniting these men in adversity, and for posterity, was their patriotic courage in ...”

“... have been delighted by that damehood. Bainbridge was brought up in Formby, a coastal town just north of Liverpool, and the fading fortunes of Merseyside throughout the 20th century have led to the notion that she had a hardscrabble upbringing. In fact, she was in many ways a privileged child. Winnie, who came from a well-to-do family with social ...”

“... Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears ...”

“... platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The heroes were a boy and a brave, north-travelling girl. At one point the Snow Queen stormed off stage-left in her silver sledge, and had she kept going, putting a girdle round the earth, she’d have been following the 56th parallel. Up the Nethergate, out of Dundee, across Scotland, away over ...”

“... squeezing pimples or playing conkers: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... he launched his new journal, the Banker, in 1926, and recruited to it such financial experts as Paul Einzig. Two years later, he persuaded Eyre and Spottis-woode to purchase a newspaper group that included the Economist, the Investors Chronicle and the Financial News as well. Long before his 30th year, he was established as a wealthy and successful ...”

“... of a future conversion. Freud, indeed, was depressed by the cheerful reception of his ideas in North America because it proved that Americans had underestimated them, failing to see how disruptive they really were of all moral and social certainties. The stubborn Cartesians of France, on the other hand, unwilling to have their trust in the dignity and ...”

“... The scene of the novel appears to be based on the novelist’s own house and estate on the coast north of Boston. Hint by hint we discover that the date is 2020, after a brief and ruinous Sino-American nuclear war. Mexico has recaptured Texas and southern California; the country is underpopulated and normal services have broken down; there is only local ...”

“... the 1990s persuaded many politicians, liberals like Madeleine Albright no less than neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz, that force works. As a consequence, when after 9/11 Bush committed the US to an open-ended ‘global war’, few dissented. Most Americans concluded that war offered just the ticket. Recent developments, including the fiasco of Iraq, have yet to ...”

“... by the idea that no-man’s-land was itself a kind of monstrous ornamental garden, possessed, as Paul Nash noted, of a weird beauty. Out of the ruins, a ruderal flora began to assert itself. ‘It is amazingly beautiful,’ Nash wrote. ‘The mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves ...”