“... In ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’, a long piece for Esquire in 1959, Simone de Beauvoir considered her ‘an export product as important as Renault automobiles’. Yet the French were in two minds about her. As the millennium approached, her celebrity remained ambiguous in a country that had changed enormously since she first ...”

“... circumscribed by the simultaneous eclipse of the British Empire and of the idea of the leisured man of letters. Nor are matters helped by such vulgar difficulties as the need to pay tradesmen, the need to keep up an appearance of sexual continence and the need to maintain a steady flow of copy. In the Raven world, yin and yang consist of a permanent ...”

“... he died in 1991 he could have run through all the major platform games – Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros – and if he’d just taken a little better care of himself, and hung onto life a couple more years, his fingers might have twitched the course of Doomguy through the military base on Phobos, and manipulated him into killing the demons from ...”

“... and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her third novel won a travel award of £500, which Carter used to ...”

“... from ancient hunters and herdsmen. Following domestication, write James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, religious and secular ideologies reinforced ‘hierarchical notions of human separateness and superiority’, and the idea of animals as somehow equal with humans gave way to the world described in the Book of Genesis. Evolutionists and creationists may ...”

“... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...”

“... may well continue as president for life: he’s only 57, a ‘small boy’ compared to 65-year-old Paul Kagame of Rwanda (23 years in office), 79-year-old Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo (26 years in office), 81-year-old Teodor0 Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea (44 years in office) and 90-year-old ...”

“... the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from ...”

“... to these essays, and in the course of this review I described his remarks on the subject of de re necessity as ‘wholly worthless’, a phrase I had hesitated over but felt was literally correct. As I feared, he raised the topic of this review. I steeled myself for his rebuke for dismissing his views so summarily, but he made no mention of the phrase ...”

“... plucking his sleeping master’s sleeve to draw his attention to the time; he was an elderly man of deferential mien who had been painted by Sicken in 1909.’ A description of the disparate lives in Mrs Wilson Clark’s house, done in this manner, would have been enough. It is a splendidly odd but entirely plausible household: a Jewish refugee professor ...”

“... in Seven Days’ and so on. After getting out of jail, Moat got a gun and a haircut ‘like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver’, and he repeatedly called Sam, who had broken up with him when he was inside; she rejected him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend down to ...”

“... belief and devastating disillusion, because he had grown up in a family with a resident guru, one Paul Brunton or P.B. Masson’s tantalising remarks about this unusual upbringing have been fleshed out in My Father’s Guru, and it’s a dilly. There have been memoirs before about growing up in a narrow sect – one thinks of Edmund Gosse and the Plymouth ...”

“... so unyielding to Morris’s probings. In principle at least, his desire to find out what sort of man Reagan was seems entirely reasonable. Of all American Presidents, the foolish-seeming and yet abominably successful Reagan surely presents the most tempting subject for character analysis. If Morris had come back armed with any insight into what lurked ...”

“... to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself. Oryx and Crake was a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. What may now surprise us is that Atwood has decided to go on living in that universe, which, however, did not have a to-be-continued sign attached to it. The wonderful cliffhanger of the ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”