“... system of thought.’ The reader will find all these items in the identikit portrait which Michael Tracey constructs. Greene was good to work for, and with, above all because he liked diversity among his associates. We were each perfectly free to weave our own views into a harmonious system of thought, if we wanted to, while he relied on his ...”

“... society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness. Imagination is part of the mystery; the other part is pace. This novel seems to impose its own slow pace on the ...”

“... sure of.’ By the end of this ingenious novel, he himself is sure of nothing. He is a taciturn young man with a languid grace, heavy dark eyelids and prominent lips – a sombre beauty with ‘latent fire which turned this picture of idleness into a figure of rhetoric’. Both Anne and Alexa love him because they believe they can ignite that latent ...”

“... In June 1494, a piglet was taken into custody in Clermont for having ‘strangled and defaced a young child in its cradle’. It seems that the suspect would have been confined in the same cell and treated in much the same way as a human prisoner, before being tried in front of a court ‘as justice and reason would desire and require’. Witnesses were ...”

“... more or less in peace as long as they provided troops to support further conquest. Giving up your young men to fight someone else’s wars was no doubt oppressive at first, but the Romans came up with incentives as they went along: not just wealth, but a form of half-citizenship (‘Latin rights’) that made possible such things as legally enforceable ...”

“... arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and really the ...”

“... when the question of Holocaust denial comes up, and Billy tells a story. Or rather Calista, the young woman who once knew nothing about movies, presents us with a dazzling mock-up of a screenplay that presents the story.‘int. café. day’, it begins. ‘A caption reads “Berlin, 1933”.’ ‘I’ll remember what I can,’ Calista promises. ‘And what ...”

“... exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.’ This is poetry as catastrophe, as Minnesotan roulette. Heaney in his The ...”

“... of Jailbird will indicate how extraordinarily consistent Vonnegut remains in his plotting. The young Starbuck is the protégé of a reclusive millionaire. At Harvard there is Communism and an affair with a fellow Party member, Mary Kathleen O’Looney. In 1938, Starbuck gets an appointment under Roosevelt, and he later holds several important civilian ...”

“... associated, interchangeable motifs. The stories themselves are of no great importance except for young Skidmore, whose world is steadily depopulated as the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting ...”

“... national consensus; whatever their experience of individuals, it has gone to form the attitude of young black English men and women to being English and being black. This consensus also serves as guidance to officials on how they should behave, since they see themselves as charged with realising the general will. In particular, judges, magistrates, policemen ...”

“... nerve to continue killing, its eventual collapse was only a matter of time. From such beginnings a young Pole could only associate the imperium with its barbed wire. The fences which defined its boundaries also defined its essence, as Kapuściński first realised in the course of a trip on the Trans-Siberian in 1958. In the customs shed at the Sino-Soviet ...”

“... obtained the money which underpins his political career by disclosing a government secret when a young private secretary; and Mrs Cheveley tells Sir Robert that she will be in the gallery with his incriminating letter to ensure that he commends the rascally Argentine canal scheme to the House. In one way, that may not have been a thousand miles from the ...”

“... Other European governments utter polite versions of the notion of good riddance, until the young and rebellious, all over Europe, instigate massive disruptions under the slogan Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques. Meanwhile, in Spain and Portugal, the tourists have abandoned their cars and their belongings, the rich have taken their assets and ...”

“... is hurt by the parting sinews And he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales. He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes Like a bullock. He always serves me now. I think he knows about my life. How we prefer To eat in when it’s cold. How someone With a foreign accent can only cook veal. He writes the price on the grease-proof packet And hands ...”