“... play The Weir has the same structure as Pinter’s The Homecoming (a man brings a woman into a close-knit group with unpredictable results), but in fact consists of four ghost stories told by a group assembled in a small rural bar on a winter’s night, three of which (told by the men) seem false, and one of which (told by the woman) appears to be ...”

“... It was, and remains, a shocking and horrible moment. Ian Buruma was born in The Hague in 1951, close to where Van Gogh grew up, and emigrated from the Netherlands in 1975, moving on to spend time in Japan and the East, as well as in the US and Britain. He is the sort of intelligent, calm and reasonable observer that we like to associate with our image of ...”

“... the same time neglecting the promotion of policies that might actually make citizens better off. A close reading of Offer’s book will make plain the poverty of imagination and wilful neglect of evidence that this blinkered approach to public policy represents. Offer’s key insight, from which most of his analysis derives, is that ‘economic resources are ...”

“... more as an engineer than an architect, preoccupied with technical and industrial questions. With a close colleague and guide, his childhood friend the engineer Max du Bois, he embarked on the manufacture of clinker bricks and the design of a slaughterhouse. Such a functional building accorded better with the factories, grain silos, automobiles and aeroplanes ...”

“... trimmed his facial hair (a goatee, to accentuate his mouth) and the style of writing he adopted: frank, indefatigable, stripped back to the bare bones of wanting and doing. ‘I push. I stroke. I smack. I hold. I open. I spread. I go. I come. I delve. I piss. I drool. I spit.’ His pursuit of casual sex can seem excessively self-interested, but Dustan was ...”

“... anchor. His book will be a useful guide for those looking for a chronological overview that pays close attention to musical detail without getting into an unapproachable level of theoretical depth; it is especially insightful on Paris (1900), In a Summer Garden (1908) and A Village Romeo and Juliet. But on the question of Delius’s form, Dibble agrees with ...”

“... Jewish identity by religion alone). In 1956 she became foreign minister, a position she held for close to a decade, under Ben-Gurion and then Levi Eshkol. She proved to be a nimble operator, earning a reputation for diplomatic intransigence.Meir’s commitment to Jewish interests was unwavering. After Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, the Gaza ...”

“... was chaired by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan trade union activist who, it later transpired, was in close contact with the CIA. As Williams writes, ‘the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of political and cultural organisations, with the aim of keeping African ...”

“... anthologies. In other words (though Hill does not use this term), Pound’s poem comes dangerously close to kitsch. This raises the question of how far ‘Envoi (1919)’ may be read as a critique of a culture in which certain forms of beauty seem unavailable. As Hill implies, the melopoeia of the poem is drawn into logopoeia since its verbal music stands in ...”

“... The individual elements of the Caledonian Road Church are not, in themselves, unusual, and have close parallels in the work of more prosaic Glaswegian architects, such as Charles Wilson, whose Free Church College of 1855-7 also features a portico raised above a high base and highlighted by towers. What distinguishes Thomson from even his most talented ...”

“... the knack/Of looking fierce in pins and black,/The suburbs wouldn’t want you back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary ...”

“... suicide, but there is no record of him after his Confessions end. Even the publication of a frank sexual memoir – the best way, Rayfield rather oddly claims, ‘to focus public attention on your identity’ – did little to rescue Victor from oblivion. The Confessions were written, in French, in either 1908 or 1912 (Rayfield’s ‘Preface’ and ...”

“... wheat only rustled through its rosary once more. The most obvious influence on Ford is Frank O’Hara, with whom he shares a tendency to exclaim (‘What a life!’, ‘Hurrah!’, ‘What a thought!’, ‘Hush!’, ‘Hark!’), a desire to register the vertiginous rush of the present moment – for which driving with no hands is a vivid ...”

“... MREs when they discovered that Moslem extremists in Somalia were backed by Sudan, which itself had close ties with Iran. Other rumours suggest that the White House was galvanised by Washington lobbying. Last November, Fred Cuny, styled as the Red Adair of the relief business, persuaded Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the Defence Department’s policy ...”

“... Theory of Proxy Warfare’, Major Amos Fox argued that the US doesn’t talk about its proxies in frank enough terms. ‘Phrases such as security force assistance, training and advising, partnered force and by, with and through are all misleading and meant to soften or hide the coarseness of proxy warfare.’ The italicised phrases (his) will be grimly ...”