“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... man. Indeed, that seems especially appropriate for a book about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Bush’s war against it. The Iraqis have a long habit of making publicly available their most embarrassing material. When I was in Baghdad for the BBC in 1969 (the first full year of the Baath regime) the Ministry of Information eagerly pressed on me stills of ...”

“... plain, he nevertheless manages to remind one of Hilliard’s young man standing in front of a rose bush. Milnes, the son of a cotton manufacturer, was radical as well as rich, and called his illegitimate son, born in Paris in 1792, Alfred Mirabeau. Thomas and Mary Coltman, again outdoors in fresh weather, she on a grey horse, he standing beside her an arm ...”

“... Bashar offered his government’s assistance in the war on terror. Though wary of his motives, the Bush administration agreed to co-operate, rendering ‘high-value’ jihadist suspects to Syria until at least 2005. The Syrian government’s ‘secret weapon’ against jihadists was to infiltrate their networks and turn suspects into government collaborators ...”

“... From the red rose-flowers’ fiery transience; Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the bush Which burnt just now with marvellous immanence. Lawrence is borrowing the rhyming iambics of Yeats’s ‘The Rose of Battle’, which croons over Maud Gonne, the rose of all the world, her ‘beauty grown sad with its eternity’. In Lawrence’s brisker ...”

“... they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants ...”

“... The world now knows about Irangate: the operation that enabled President Reagan, Vice-President Bush and all their men to help themselves to the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran, and spend most of their ill-gotten gains on financing terrorists fighting against the elected government in Nicaragua. Now, at last, people are beginning to find out about an ...”

“... of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise. Blair did, however, lambast himself for one decision made in office:Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my head till ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals that Blair frequently pledged to ‘do ...”

“... back to Landow. The idea of hypertext began with a paper called ‘As we may think’ by Vannevar Bush, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1946. An electronic version of the physical solution Bush imagined – a desk with screens on which mechanically retrieved microfilm was to be projetted – is now in place, in the ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... him by deigning to see him in Washington, Duncan Smith became as willing a slave of President Bush as the British prime minister was. Unlike Clarke, he strongly and unthinkingly supported Bush and Blair’s disastrous and illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Conservative voters, who evidently knew more about the ...”

“... I assume, to one of the more famous images of the Holocaust. Here was the Terrorist section. Peter Jennings’s ABC news feed from 9/11 is piped in from somewhere under a stuffed animal, near some wires and a computer memory board. Yellow crime-scene tape wraps itself like a yellow ribbon around the top of the plexi fence, at waist height. Upstairs is a ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew the ...”