“... offices of the Transitional National Council by contrast felt as placid as an old people’s home, or a cruise liner. One senior cabinet minister didn’t yet have a single secretary, and seemed to have only very vague ideas of what his department needed. One floor up, I found a deputy minister watching television three days after the fall of the ...”

“... set in present-day America, is narrated by a middle-aged Viking. Harald would much rather stay at home with his wife than set off on yet another bloodthirsty raid, but on Lindisfarne there is a monastery to sack and villagers to disembowel, and a man can’t turn down a job. Harald employs a modern American idiom, and the story initially presents itself as a ...”

“... at Pat but Pat looked away. Nor was Pat going to say anything further because he was fucking off home as soon as he swallowed what he had lying. There was no point sitting here yapping to a bunch of fucking prejudiced rightwing bastards. And Gavin turned on him once more: What d’you mean ye deny ye get long holidays?    I deny I get long ...”

“... bunch of goofy friends, prominent among them Rupert Giles, the school librarian (played by Anthony Stewart Head, whose career, before Buffy, had peaked with those Nescafé Gold Blend ads), and Angel, a vampire cursed with a soul, who now has his own spin-off series. It sounds fairly crappy. People who’ve never seen it tend to think it’s crappy. But they ...”

“... When I go home to the Ayrshire town where I grew up, I’ve noticed in recent years that even the dowdiest and most traditional hotels, where the outer limits of exoticism used to be a round of tinned pineapple on top of a gammon steak, have embraced fusion cuisine. Multicultural eclecticism, from food to fashion, is the norm in today’s Britain, and not just in the big cities ...”

“... curve that would shame a Widmerpool. A Horatio Alger parable that lifted him from a single-parent home in the shadows of Wormwood Scrubs to a Mellon Fellowship at Yale, and the literary editorship of the Spectator. The rest comes from the gossip columns. Londoner’s Diary in the Evening Standard can be relied on for a snigger of fantastical cameos: Ackroyd ...”

“... plunger was wielded most wondrously by Nanton, whose sound-effects, according to the cornetist Rex Stewart, ranged ‘from the wail of a new-born baby to the raucous hoot of an owl, from the bloodcurdling scream of an enraged tiger to the eerie cooing of a mourning dove. Tricky had them all in his bag of tricks and he utilised them with thoughtful discretion ...”

“... Three hundred miles further on, we stayed with Ali Reza in Sefid Han. ‘This is a very poor home,’ Akbar said to me when we reached the unlit sloping courtyard. Two goats were kept in an old cave beneath the house. Ali Reza took us into a small white-washed room. Here, too, the only piece of furniture was a television cabinet. Again, there was no ...”

“... one purpose in mind, the safeguard of our jobs, our community. My village of Grimethorpe is the home of one of the most famous colliery brass bands in the world and of one of the finest first-aid teams in Great Britain; a happy village, a village of hardworking, moral, principled people; the village where my two sons, both miners, and two daughters were ...”

“... scribe which found its way to Persia, then back to the Ottoman court and finally to its present home: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was copied often on the way and a Persian version of around 1600 hangs beside it in the exhibition. The wall paintings he may have made have not survived. Questions of ...”

“... suggest that police action against reporters’ malfeasance is as hopeless as the PCC’s. As Stewart Tendler, a Times crime reporter, put it, apparently without irony, the relation ‘between police officers and crime reporters is very similar to that between police and an informant’. Indeed; except the cops were now playing informant and the hacks ...”

“... places for different reasons. In Ramsay’s poem, a young man is leaving both his West Highland home and his girl behind, perhaps because he intends to join the British army or navy. In Nicol’s painting, the couple are migrants reluctantly quitting the old world for the new, perhaps because their landlord has evicted them. In the ...”

“... is hard to define; I like the approaching-a-definition suggested by the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, one of Berlant’s long-time collaborators. She writes that ‘ordinary affects’ arepublic feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they are also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms ...”

“... and collections published over the last few years cover approximately the same territory, but Stewart’s book is at once readable and rich in new ideas, the most important contribution to the study of both sexuality and art in the ancient world for some time. Unusually for a classical scholar, Stewart begins by ...”

“... rates rise, there is a sense of unease, bordering on panic, that goes beyond economics. An idea of home that is dear to the English middle class is, it seems, under threat. Hermann Muthesius, whose Das englische Haus first appeared just over a century ago and has now been translated in full for the first time, would have sympathised. For him too the English ...”