“... this week. Perhaps he feels no guilt this minute; only relief at something to tell his chief. It may take years to find the verdict of his own mind, a reminiscent smile or an inner yell that attempts to recall the tiny deaf missile – escaping faster than ...”

“... block like a row of thoughts, tatty and predictable. In what passes for an age of confession, may what I bury stay hidden, for form’s sake.      * Then again the tubers do look a lot like old mens’ members, shrivelled in a tidy bloodless heap, like the spoils of some Biblical battle – gentile foreskins on the field of God’s ...”

“... ash mostly, hickory, oak; greying in the weather, by April starting to rot, outsides sodden by May, too crumbly even to splinter. But then to uncover the first layer; white birch, bright with the whiteness that whitens your hands like chalk; flesh-coloured wood still firm in its sheath of papery bands, flaw-lined like slubbed silk. Five months ... Our ...”

“... too deep therequest, too slippery theladdering of –what was the tongue –cold – arrowing – may it notbe English – if they inviteme back – some morninglike thisafter historyif they drag meback some morninglike this onethe massacre still hotin the fieldthe flashy glinting win again oflanguage overshriek call whine clickover growl chit cough bray ...”

“... sir, were I human’). As for Caliban, the best Prospero can do is to propose that his slave may represent something about himself: ‘This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.’ Is he assuming the white man’s burden or admitting that Caliban’s brutality may have something to do with imprisonment, torture and ...”

“... head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has strengthened him politically. It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, Maliki has an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people get no more than three or four ...”

“... with which the Sri Lankan army rooted out the Tamil Tigers, regardless of the collateral damage.In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House, since he was challenging most of the assumptions on which the escalation of the war was ...”

“... no idea how to send a text. So Peter Mandelson wasn’t referring to them when he went on TV in May to press for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, saying that figures were down due to competition from emails and texts.I spluttered into my tea when I heard him say that. ‘Figures are down.’ We hear that sentence almost every day at work when ...”

“... junta. The assistant secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, met senior representatives of the junta in May, and last autumn Obama himself took part in a regional summit at which Burmese leaders were present. ‘We are saying to the junta that we are open to dealing with them, no matter what’s happened in the past,’ an official said. The EU and Australia have ...”

“... outside the writer, an observed rather than a felt experience. The moment Harris singles out, in May 1798, when Coleridge ran outdoors into a storm in Devon, hatless and full of febrile sensibility, was born of the desire for immersion in the elemental, the dissolution of self in the infinite, which made weather as great a theme as love for the ...”

“... but Penguin’s decision to publish a translation has done wonders for its reputation. It may not figure on their classics list, as Mai Jia modestly admitted to Chinese journalists, but he joins the sequence of distinguished Chinese authors Penguin has published in the last ten years, including Qian Zhongshu, Lu Xun and Eileen Chang. All the same, if ...”

“... the jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli war crimes committed in the conflict. But ICC membership may not be the panacea that some believe it to be. Even if the court overcame the obstacles to bringing a case, it still might not be able to deliver Israeli suspects to the dock. In the short term, the real value of an ICC case to Palestinians would be the ...”

“... plausible culprits: the Hittites claimed responsibility for the conquest of Cyprus, the Kashka may well have brought about the Hittites’ own downfall, and we know that the Kassite kingdom fell to the Elamites. Cline surveys other possible causes of collapse: internal rebellions, declining trade, earthquakes and climate change. The latest pollen analysis ...”

“... high price of petrol. There is an Isis-like massacre and an Islamic Brotherhood-like leader who may or may not have been involved. Nameless country-less refugees are being trucked to camps on the city’s outskirts. The narrator, Rasa, is an unmarried, frustrated, over-educated and under-employed Arab man-boy. By day he ...”

“... that Pound-as-Propertius was criticising. This would have been news to Pound. The poem’s ‘I’ may flit between Pound in 1919 and Propertius in 20 bc, but the point of the ventriloquism was to get the reader in 1919 or 2016 to recognise their own ‘now’: to see how empires – Roman, British, capitalist – corrupt public taste and shrink ...”