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“... of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little north of the equator, and just west of the International Dateline, Micronesia sits between China, the US and Australia. Pohnpei is 5000 km from Hawaii, 4000 km from Taipei and 3000 km from the Australian city of Cairns. The UN created eleven trust territories ...”

“... police, with a helping hand from Washington. He had travelled east to attend a peace conference in North Vietnam.Muammar Gaddafi was the last influential African leader to claim the mantle of Pan-Africanism and call for the creation of an African superstate. By the end of the 1970s, with his hopes for Pan-Arabism dashed, he was doubling down on Libyan ...”

“... Labour – for voters, the journey between the parties isn’t a difficult one,’ the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney told me. ‘You get a lot of people on the doors swithering, to the extent that one piece of literature or a breaking story could change their view.’ The question was whether Ahmed, the party’s candidate in Glasgow South West, was someone who ...”

“... counterparts their children were ‘fatter, larger and had better calves to their legs’. Further north, the Sami reindeer herders of Lapland offered a glimpse into the past. In the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer ‘Lapps’, a Scandinavian safari complex that enabled Enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a ...”

“... became a power in the land as the operations of the Mafia extended from Sicily to Rome and the North. Other national shortcomings are often noted: administrative inefficiency, lack of respect for the law, want of patriotism. But in the widespread conviction that the condition of Italy is abnormal, immovable government, pervasive corruption and militarised ...”

“... bombs, breaking glass, stones hurled at cars: the riots of 2011 travelled from Clarence Road, just north of the Old Rectory, down Mare Street to the nexus of commercial enterprises, the betting shops that used to be banks, around Hackney Central station. Funds provided by central government for regeneration were siphoned into factory outlets for ...”

“... home these days to Emmerdale, that hotbed of the lust, murder and arson so typical of rural North Yorkshire. 29 March. One unforeseen blessing of the war in Iraq is the settlement in Northern Ireland. Blair can hardly claim the credit, as it was only when the focus moved to the Middle East that there was real progress towards agreement in Northern ...”

“... of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 state-owned companies and their 650,000 employees: he fired half a ...”

“... which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our life’ we forget ‘the sorrows of the other half’. And so on, ‘from the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables, from the lowest depths of hell to the last fixed star beyond the ...”

“... breasts – nipples – yolks) is crass and juvenile. Painter and Model shows a clothed Celia Paul with her brush pointing at the model’s penis, while her naked right foot squeezes paint out of a tube on the floor. This makes the visual double entendres in James Bond movies look sophisticated. Early on, he painted with a Memling-like precision, each ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... France, always averse to identity politics, tended to agree.Caribbean, Asian, Turkish or North African were no longer the descriptions that mattered. The defining term was ‘Muslim’: what Muslims did and thought was suddenly central to the immigration debate. Increasingly, the debate was about protecting European values by trying to bring existing ...”

“... at Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide ...”

“... to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially with Elliot Paul), and Jolas, too, was at the heart of art movements about which at the time the outside world knew little – Surrealism, Dadaism and Joyce among them. Few small mags have done as much to ‘make art free’. As well as Stein’s ‘Elucidation’, the first ...”

“... public treatments for it, until he comes to realise he is happier sexless – released from his North London modern marriage, regressing into his monastic, homosexual Oxford community, though that is at the very point of succumbing to co-education. The more you think about this novel, the less the end reads like a solution, and the less Amis’s thinking ...”