“... everyone that he has pure Arabic blood [apparently Klee had let slip that his mother’s family may have come originally from North Africa], but is a typical Galician Jew. He paints ever more madly, he bluffs and bewilders [er blufft und verblüfft], his students are gaping with wide-open eyes and mouths, a new, unheard-of art makes its entrance in the ...”

“... about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade. Shadid’s paternal ...”

“... In May 1941, after the sudden flight to England of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had deluded himself that he could persuade the British to make peace, a joke went round Berlin. ‘So you’re the madman,’ Churchill says to Hess. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy!’ That Hitler was insane was something many Germans came to believe in the later stages of the war ...”

“... moment when we first became conscious of ourselves in all our fragile splendour. Space travel may have stalled just as the balloon’s early dreams did, but satellites – the grandchildren of James Glaisher’s stratospheric ascents – have become integral to the global communications that have transformed the present, and on which our future is now ...”

“... cup of tea gazing at a typewriter. No one has suggested the lady-writer with knitting shot. It may be that they dared not. The knitting me wasn’t an image I thought sat well with what I wrote – or anything about me. I feared in the minds of others a Jenny version of ‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia knits!’ But not long ago, Julia Gillard, then prime ...”

“... must be there, because you can feel them and you are even pretty sure that you can see them. You may also believe that your home or furniture is infested, but you may be the only one who knows they are there. No one seems to think they exist except you. Nothing seems to get rid of them. So what are they? University of ...”

“... characters’ lack of self-awareness, their bad judgment, their blind hypocrisy. Honest readers may conclude that they are not so very different themselves; when the feeling of superiority wears off, satire occasionally gives rise to sympathy. Rakoff tries the same thing, but hers is a more anxious novel than McCarthy’s, more ambivalent, and thus much ...”

“... writer has his shadows, and by middle age we know these counterlives are part of us. For some, it may be a dead father still stalking their prose. Forster spoke of his mother, standing in that house on the margins of Stevenage, surrounded by all her plates and her shawls, waiting for him. But the media age has brought those shades from places we haven’t ...”

“... as they did their former oppressors; indeed, the canto’s opening suggests that the oppressor may be housed even within the very terms of freedom: Black Consciousness. The Whiteman’s soul is black. The shadow of his body is more native to the Earth than he is. This, an adaptation of Steve Biko’s taunt to well-meaning white liberals who thought they ...”

“... risks, he is ruthlessly competitive, brash, and bullies people who work for him. His presidency may be remembered for its profligacy. On the Friday when it was announced that the merchant bank Bear Stearns – famous for its risk-taking, cigar-chomping deal-making – was close to bankruptcy, Bush addressed the Economic Club of New York. He said it was ...”

“... a stuff about them,’ Norm grunted, still bent over his taxidermy efforts on a giant prawn. Norm may be a repository of ancient tribal wisdom, a man true to the covenant of the ancestral serpent, one who ‘could grab hold of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him’, but he is also inconveniently married to the ...”

“... forces in South Ossetia that this was an ‘operation to restore constitutional order’.) In May 2004, Tbilisi reasserted control over the Adjara region on the Black Sea coast, run as a fiefdom by the Moscow-backed Aslan Abashidze. Saakashvili made his first moves in South Ossetia soon after, by forcibly closing the Ergneti market – a hub for trade in ...”

“... with the doors and windows open for some cool air. I can hear bombing in the north; more people may be dying as I write this. The death toll is climbing on both sides, but the number of Israeli and Palestinian fatalities can’t be compared. Fourteen Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians this year, two by rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and ...”

“... How excessive was the excess of the past? Scott Fitzgerald may have decided that the very rich are different from you and me, but they live in our own time; so we can begin to comprehend their wealth, even when spent on private jets, triplex penthouses or million-dollar birthday parties. The scales for measuring wealth in the past seem less certain, when the contemporary value of a pound or louis or scudo is difficult to fix except in terms of relatively abstract comparisons ...”

“... a state of Woosterdom or Woolfness; at least in America people in novels still seem to work. This may have something to do with undergraduates reading Emerson and Thoreau, or it may have something to do with everyone needing health insurance. People who read novels in Britain and Ireland generally do so on holiday from ...”