“... GLC’s politics are especially salient given the bigotry that today masquerades as the ‘war on woke’. Livingstone’s GLC was the subject of endless tabloid scare stories about the ‘loony left’. Its Ethnic Minorities Unit was bombed by fascists in 1985. Its policies prompted the Mail campaign that led to the introduction of Section ...”

“... literary protest within the court as a harmless outlet for the resentment of a newly-tamed ruling class? To answer those questions we would need the answer to another. If the conventions governing permissible expression are unclear to us, were they any clearer to contemporaries? Sometimes we can watch writers approaching what they sense to be the ...”

“... a student of Nabokov: ‘in reading one should notice and fondle the details,’ he adjured his class at Cornell. As a writer, Nabokov is a fanatic for detail, his mimesis rivalling that of nature itself: ‘when a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of the leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-holes were ...”

“... others, those thinkers in the Marxist tradition who pin their faith to a generalised theory of class, ideology and social formation. Hence also their hostility toward any male critic, like Culler, who claims to arrive at a feminist position by deploying theory beyond and against its usual (phallocentric) order of assumptions. To this way of thinking it is ...”

“... prose. Many of these disaffected readers are likely to be female. When Amis insisted on a bidding war for The Information, the last volume of his loose West London trilogy, prospective publishers examined his sales figures, which were lower than his reputation would have suggested. Women, who tend to buy more books than men, were tending to buy relatively few ...”

“... on stone about two centuries later. That is not the point. The document belongs to a recognisable class of patriotic fabrications already put to good employ by Athenian orators. Debates about authenticity and authorship have a perennial charm. Pseudepigrapha flourished in Antiquity, in compensation, perhaps, for the decadence of epic and the rudimentary ...”

“... which Munir himself attended, was basic. A fellow pupil recalls that the boys, forty of them to a class, had to sit on the floor because there was no furniture; the bathrooms were filthy and there was no water in the taps. This was the era of the Islamist dictator General Zia and each lunchtime the boys lined up to recite their prayers.After two years in a ...”

“... unemployment, bankruptcy, about British pension funds, the wake-up call to shareholders and the class action suit brought by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of the restaurant Bayona because contamination, scarcity or outright loss of the primary ingredients in the region’s cuisine – shrimp, crab, fish and crayfish – is one current and probably ...”

“... shows that only a tiny minority asks these questions. Most people react to the horrors of war by turning to God for protection, solace and comfort.’ Since most of the benighted masses do not ask such hard questions, such questions do not really exist: this is Johnson’s implication. His message is that religion has survived, in part, because the ...”

“... and which in the Thirties brought about the Great Depression, political chaos, dictatorship and war. In the first instance it is the instrument of money that inflation hits, while deflation has an immediate impact on people, denying them the opportunity to work and earn, and to buy goods and services, which would allow others to work and earn. It is ...”

“... beyond the fact that Abacha, personally, wanted these men dead. There was going to be no dirty war, in other words, despite our initial fears that disaffected writers, journalists, lawyers and students were about to be rounded up and shot in batches in the nearest football stadium. How we flattered ourselves! Abacha was never worried about the ...”

“... who tended the donkey engines; they greased the machinery and riddled the furnaces. During World War Two, when ships carrying tea and jute to the UK were torpedoed, they were the seamen least likely to survive. Thousands burned to death, trapped below deck. Yet their lives at sea were by no means awful. They went to many countries, in East Asia, the Middle ...”

“... book, The Question of Bruno, in 2000 (dedicated to his wife, and to Sarajevo). Once the Bosnian war was over, Hemon could, presumably, have returned to his native city. What had not been a choice became one; he decided to make himself into an American writer.Hemon’s work stages both his departure and return. In the novella Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead ...”

“... 2011. Throughout the Mubarak era the Copts had become accustomed to being treated as second-class Egyptians, almost entirely excluded from what passed for political life. The legal but hopelessly small opposition parties, notably the New Wafd and el-Ghad, provided some scope for a few Copts to engage in a simulacrum of politics, but Mubarak’s National ...”

“... unironically celebrated Sunak’s appointment of a free speech tsar as another volley in his war on ‘woke nonsense’ – a campaign, as Sunak described it last year, against objectionable viewpoints that have ‘permeated public life’: that biology doesn’t determine gender, that language is malleable, that Britain must own up to its colonial ...”