“... Secretary, Mr Donald ‘Rummy’ Rumsfeld, has just warned us that wearing down the Iraqi Army may take some time. Why does no one listen to him? Like most other politicians, he can, unexpectedly, utter a (belated) truth. George Bush has asked the Congress to stump up an extra $75 billion to replenish expended hardware and to transport more soldiery from ...”

“... not merely of a past that has been shattered, requiring reconstruction, but of a past that may, even to its subject, be imaginary. The novel begins with a highly specific moment: ‘Maria Poniatowski let herself into Mrs Ellington’s apartment at 7.55 a.m. precisely (she was always five minutes early; she timed her walk that way), on the third Tuesday ...”

“... For a few weeks, between mid-April and early May, I was in Bagram, thirty miles north of Kabul, to cover the war. At about six o’clock on most evenings I went for a run. From our tents in Viper City I would jog past the 10th Mountain Division, through the lines of the 101st Airborne’s Quick Reaction Force, past the long queue for dinner, past the stinking row of portakabins and out onto the main road through the base ...”

“... or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which ...”

“... lessons. The children who get extra help are those who find it hard to keep up and join in: they may have learning difficulties, or behavioural problems, or they may not speak very good English. The teacher tells one of them that he’s done so well he might get to go and see the headmaster at the end of term. The child ...”

“... from any other novels that I have read.’ The Map of Love suggests that Soueif herself may have Tolstoyan aspirations. Aspirations, not pretensions: there is an engaging modesty about her voice. Still, both her earlier novel, In the Eye of the Sun (nearly eight hundred pages), and The Map of Love (more than five hundred) are more than romantic love ...”

“... reduce the devout life to moralising calculation and safe asceticism’. A string of other shifts may be mooted: the emergence as a distinctive Jesuit characteristic of systematic hostility to all forms of Protestantism, which had not been in the original brief; the passage from the intellectual anti-humanism promoted by Ignatius in Paris to the classical ...”

“... enough to confirm his guilt in a suitably dramatic manner. The disobliging reader, however, may not be as satisfied with Appleby’s explanation as the surviving characters in the novel seem to be. With only a few minor adjustments, Innes could have turned any – or all – of the innocent three into the guilty party. It’s almost always possible for ...”

“... was ferreted away behind all this stimulating rubbish has completely evaporated.’ This may be part of their purpose – that people remember the past in order to obliterate it is another of Sinclair’s anxieties. ‘The English love things when they are no longer there,’ he writes in Dining on Stones. ‘A nation of ...”

“... family he is not. Hess asks him ‘what that says about the way you feel about Jews’. Hess may have a point, but it also doesn’t occur to him that what Rotheram is resisting may not be the identification itself so much as the Nazis’ urge to label him. Rotheram’s story brushes up against Esther and Karsten’s ...”

“... Stobart is difficult to dislike, but there are suggestions, in the book and elsewhere, that he may be quite a hard man. Thus: ‘Only two drivers out of some two hundred refused to wear collars and ties when Edward first introduced them. He imposed them: in fact, he made them compulsory. The two who refused both left immediately.’ Deborah Rodgers is ...”

“... at Maastricht are absurdly restrictive and could not survive a severe recession, which there may soon well be, without inflicting unacceptable damage on many European economies. But, characteristically, the Conservative Europhobes do not make that case; they merely bleat in Mercian style about national sovereignty and national independence, talking what ...”

“... elk. The interaction between wolves and their environment takes place on many timescales. It may take between ten and a hundred years for their contribution to the greening of Yellowstone to be felt, while an elk can be eaten in a matter of hours. Grizzly bears, black bears, coyotes, bald eagles, golden eagles, ravens and magpies are all common visitors ...”

“... Of Haddon-Riddoch the publishers say only that he ‘started’ as a trap collector, of whom there may be more than we would think. An earlier, slimmer version of his book appeared in 2001. Its title is not the least of its oddities; it is as if the public hangman had published a rundown on drops and nooses called ‘Urban Reveries’. Fundamentally, it is a ...”

“... the room that ‘it’s about masturbation.’ It isn’t clear how literally she means this; she may be making a wry comment on her husband’s profession – the writing of novels could be seen as a self-indulgent and sterile occupation. Developing, if unconsciously, the metaphorical potential of the theme, another character, Jocelyn, says later that what ...”