“... in Portugal, in literature or anything else, and his mischievous suggestion is that ‘Portugal’ may just mean ‘romantic’ – there couldn’t be episodes of any other sort of life there. He is doing this, however, with sly intelligence, in an undeniably realist Portuguese novel. The writer’s master and companion in this venture, in spite of the ...”

“... to learn to cheat.’ The Sharpeville massacre, which took place on Cole’s twentieth birthday, may well have been another lesson in the same vein.Cole went on to play the race hierarchies in South Africa for all he was worth. He changed his name from Kole and persuaded the apartheid authorities to reclassify him as a Coloured person, allowing him to move ...”

“... grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.The beginning of my obsession coincided ...”

“... a treatise of systematics is bound to be more explicit about doctrine than a narrative poem. It may also be that Milton was cautious enough, in a vernacular poem published during his lifetime, to avoid bringing too much attention to his most controversial positions. Paradise Lost does not show God the Father creating the Son. But it does show the Father ...”

“... two years later, reported on the Rio Olympics for the Guardian.In How to Save the Amazon (Bonnier, May 2025), the half-finished manuscript Phillips left behind which was completed by his friends and colleagues, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts suggests that two reporting trips in 2015 were responsible for Phillips’s awakening. For the Washington ...”

“... Irish as well as English signs.Concrete barriers blocking roads along the 310-mile-long border may have disappeared, but not the 25-foot-high ‘peace walls’ separating Protestant from Catholic districts in Belfast and elsewhere. The balance of power had been shifting slowly towards the Catholics until about six years ago, when the process sped up. The ...”

“... Act 2003, which introduced the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, which came into force on 1 May 2005. These contain a mandatory regulation: ‘Every building must be designed and constructed in such a way that in the event of an outbreak of fire within the building, or from an external source, the spread of fire on the external walls of the building is ...”

“... some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the owner of a popular café near the law ...”

“... can take for a new technology to percolate down to the mass of the population: ‘vacuum cleaners may by 1955 have been in a majority of households, but washing machines were in only 18 per cent and refrigerators in a mere 8 per cent. In Wales, as late as 1960, there were fridges in just 5 per cent of households.’ He also makes the point that, after a ...”

“... deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him exactly what happened. When he asks the boy’s mother for permission to speak to the child, she looks at him ‘in a peculiar and criticising manner. To anybody but a half-blind man it would have said, “You want another of the knocks ...”

“... yourself a lot of grief. Displacement activities abound, fuelled by the lingering fear that it may already be too late. What if you write the book and it’s no good, or at least not good enough to rescue your tattered reputation? What if by the time the book comes out the field has moved on? Before you can get going you need to bring your thinking up to ...”

“... the upheaval (already latent in the first hours of conflict) soon became glaringly apparent: in May, radical demonstrators were attempting to storm and overthrow the National Assembly created by the February Revolution in Paris, while in Vienna Austrian democrats protested against the slow pace of liberal reform and established a Committee of Public ...”

“... under different designators, such as ‘Rakhine Muslims’ or ‘Chittagonian Muslims’. Some may well have arrived from Bangladesh after Burma’s independence in 1948, following a migratory route that long predated the drawing of hard borders and that has served both Buddhists and Muslims moving in either direction. But after Myanmar’s first ...”

“... and Russia in particular. The US National Defence Strategy 2018 notes the threat that competitors may use tactics short of open war to achieve their ends, including ‘information warfare, ambiguous or denied proxy operations and subversion’. The most recent report of the US National Defence Strategy Commission describes ‘the growing prevalence of ...”

“... is, I think, Bishop’s final formal representation of literature as sheer ongoingness. The bus may be flowing, but it is never flown. And the sharp demarcation of the word ‘historical’, so final in ‘At the Fishhouses’, has given way to a concept altogether less angular – the grandparents, out of time at last, talking in that Eternity which is ...”