“... of life, and standards of civilised behaviour’. In a remote part of Abyssinia in 1933 he met a young Danakil tribesman who had just killed three men: ‘He looked about eighteen, with a ready, friendly smile and considerable charm . . . He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for ...”

“... his early forties, has become a barrister, is married to the selfless Mary, and has two children, Robert and Thomas. Eleanor, Patrick’s mother, has had a stroke, and is immobilised and nearly speechless in a nursing home. But before her decline she was able to stiff her son one last time, by bequeathing the family home in the South of France to a devious ...”

“... for the jacket was from the second scene of ‘Marriage à la Mode’ and devoted entirely to the young countess’s face. The absence of any of her 18th-century gear brings her seductively into our time. It’s now clear that the glimmer in her half-closed eyes and the smile on her sensual mouth have a secret cause. She is reliving a night of love-making ...”

“... thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges stayed in St Andrews, mentions the ...”

“... a small rectangular document in Russian script which bore a photograph of a shy, desperately young man in Soviet Air Force uniform. ‘The Mojaheddin picked this up after his helicopter crashed,’ the American said. ‘Nice-looking kid. Why do they send these boys to Afghanistan to die? Didn’t they learn anything from Vietnam?’ The Russians did ...”

“... is in the older, conventional mode, and nothing surpasses the opening scene in which Fergus’s young and disreputable mother puts him into his first kilt for a visit to his grandfather: it is funny and moving, the sort of thing that ought to give sentimentality a good name. Set in London in 1973-4, A Married Man is up to a point a skilled and pleasurable ...”

“... research institutes were wrecked, and scientists jailed or executed. The case of the brilliant young physicist Matvei Bronstein, shot in February 1938, is particularly striking. Bronstein’s widow, Lydia Chukovskaya, no less courageous than her friend Anna Akhmatova, in the long run faced down Stalinism, and tells her husband’s fate in her story ...”

“... Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female employees of West End drapery stores. Edwin, still ...”

“... of the Christian religion in Saudi Arabia is about as welcome as the image of Satan. Hence the young men who must die in defence of the Gulf states were not permitted to celebrate Christmas in public nor to wear crucifixes. The Archbishop of Canterbury wisely refrained from desecrating the desert with his presence, albeit that he has now assured his flock ...”

“... an academic job, permanent residence in New York City. But in part because of his work with young people – his screenplay for, and novelisation of, Spike Jonze’s film of Where the Wild Things Are, and his 826 National organisation, dedicated to teaching underprivileged young people to write – and in part because ...”

“... scene of The Discovery of Slowness – Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit – depicts Franklin as a young boy, playing catch badly because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with ‘their way of doing things’. For Nadolny, Franklin’s fatal fascination with the Arctic stems from his ...”

“... of creating anything then, it was of explaining myself to other people, an experience that, as a young man, I craved above all others. My deepest fears were of being left out, of not getting the joke, of missing social cues. The TV teen-drama trope of the nerd who, told that the popular girl likes him, humiliates himself by asking for a date, represented, to ...”

“... plotting between Intelligence agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as with ...”

“... 600 kilometres from Johannesburg. They are all decent people – the two white liberals, their young children, the trusted servant, the peaceable villagers. All human instinct argues that this is not, after all, an impossible situation. Nadine Gordimer, in her unsparing new novel, suggests otherwise. Her recent Burger’s Daughter, though bleak in its ...”

“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. British and American English do indeed differ in all sorts of ways, as the following list of equivalent pairs will remind any doubters: lift/elevator, push-chair/stroller, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, windscreen/windshield ...”