“... the intricacies of world politics’. A few pages later, he writes: ‘At the beginning of May, Osama bin Laden was killed by the Americans in Pakistan. And once again, I personally entered the international newspapers.’ The reference here is to an article on the Arab Spring Thirlwell published in Le Monde last ...”

“... having put my hand to the plough I invariably look back.’ Or: ‘Every Sunday morning you may think of Morris and me together – he reads a book to me and I make drawings for a big Virgil he is writing – it is to be wonderful and put an end to printing.’ In the V&A you can stand looking at a gold page from the Aeneid with Dowson directly as ...”

“... more powerful than the ways natural scientists know physical objects. Radical as this claim may sound today, it goes back at least to the early 18th century, to the principle of ‘the reciprocity of the made and the true’ as formulated by Giambattista Vico: what humans have constructed they can know truly, as opposed to natural things that are the ...”

“... to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. (The convention states that asylum seekers may have to opt for unlawful departure from one country and unlawful entry into another and that this must not prejudice their claim.) But Labor has never been far behind the Coalition. In the 1990s Paul Keating’s administration introduced mandatory detention ...”

“... in someone’s mind before it got onto the screen. What we can say is that any place in the world may be both real and imaginary – Proust says we spend far more of our lives in the places that we think of than in the places where we actually are – and that while so many films pretend to show us reality, their authority rests on their showing only what ...”

“... plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn’t do too much damage.’ He’s ...”

“... Their duties included dusting the weapons supposedly left behind by Agamemnon’s army.In May 334 bc Trojan tourism got a boost from Xerxes’ ultimate successor. Alexander the Great and his best friend, Hephaestion, anointed the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus respectively and raced around the burial mound in imitation of the funeral rites described ...”

“... partcomposed of vitreous ash, silica,ferrous oak gall,resentment, griefs, squabbles and squallsit may yet enthrallthe plane’s state-of-the-artcombustion chamber, clogging the engine with molten glassthe way a poem may yet stop the heart.One vanishing plume, or pall of dust, leads to another dust scrawl, and then to ...”

“... Kuchmar, who was then the president, came several times each summer to the south coast. Every May the entire route from Simferopol airport to his house in Yalta was paved afresh. No other road was ever touched. The Crimeans, who had lived in one of the richest and best-served regions under Soviet rule, felt they were neglected and discriminated against by ...”

“... an individual or group to accumulate intellectual value or capital, much less trade on it. This may sound – and it obviously is – cack-handed and incompetent, but something of the same logic is at work in the short-termism that is currently remaking the academic workforce. Many university departments simply could not function without the energy, talent ...”

“... is to be located. Abandon the idea of interpreting a dream, and what of interest is left? I may be biased. A reader’s attitude to this whole project will be influenced by her attitude to literary dreams. I’m neutral to sceptical. ‘I don’t read dreams,’ a critic (a good critic) once told me flatly. He meant, dream sequences in novels. Every ...”

“... a piece of the thing itself. Piano is unusual in finding both equally important. A building may be like a ship, as a visual and emotional metaphor, but a building next to the water can also carry over elements directly from the shipyards – like the new Whitney Museum on the Hudson, with its haphazard piles of container-like structures. Piano’s ...”

“... put forward by the Sharon-Peres government – with the silent endorsement of the Zionist left – may satisfy some Arab regimes, such as those in Egypt and Jordan, they will not be enough for those countries’ civil societies, politicised by radical Islam. The American goal of ‘democratising’ the Middle East – as currently pursued by its troops in Iraq ...”

“... in which the corn negates the seed and so on, is owed directly or indirectly to him. All that may be thrown away, and only the demands of religious observance could want it kept. But along with it, logicians and their natural philosophical allies characteristically throw out an entire dimension of social, political and psychological thought: a dimension ...”

“... a new father-in-law, the super-rich and reputedly horrible doctor (whose doctorate he thinks may be a mere honorific) of the book’s title. His work for the chocolate firm consists chiefly of translating – from languages he claims to have picked up during a childhood spent in France, Turkey and Paraguay. By one of the story’s few ...”