“... of Grandin’s book brilliantly evokes this mixture of modern and anti-modern elements. On 29 May that year, roughly five hundred Mayan peasants assembled in the town centre to ask the mayor to hear their complaints against local planters, which were to be presented by a union delegation from the capital. Firing on the protesters, a military detachment ...”

“... the will. I had the same reaction as I read Piers Morgan’s diaries. Whatever sense of humour I may have had drained away as the ever ebullient, jokey, matey, vindictive Morgan described a self-contained world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very ...”

“... skills – and his penchant for non-Western dress and fraternising with the locals. His methods may have appeared extreme, but they earned tacit approval from the East India Company, which sponsored Burton’s later voyages in disguise in Arabia and East Africa. Burton made much of his intimacy with Indians, and was called a ‘white nigger’ by some of ...”

“... the plague while in Newgate. We don’t know much about what Donne did when he left university. He may have travelled abroad. A ‘Jhon Downes’ is recorded in a list of household servants of the Catholic Earl of Derby from 1587, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or not that was the poet. Donne reappears in the records when in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s ...”

“... and sometimes an alibi – in the resulting ‘primacy of foreign policy’. But it may be time to ask whether the reaction has gone too far. It is at least counter-intuitive to explain the rise of an extreme nationalist movement with so little regard to Germany’s international position. The interaction of foreign policy and domestic politics ...”

“... the building except in the bars, restaurants and ‘any other situation where the dignity of MEPs may be compromised’. So I proposed to film Farage as he went to collect his moolah from the allowances office. As he opens the door, he turns to me and says: ‘Come and film this, it’s a feeding frenzy in here.’ But just as I’m about to do so, a French ...”

“... about himself. Unluckily, ‘The sky’ sounds like a play on the poet’s name, and the predicate may perhaps offer clues about his condition (I have seen both the following ascribed to Schuyler): the schizophrenic ‘slowly/swiftly’, or else the bipolar ‘went blue to grey’, a past verb – more, painful, relearning of language – suggesting the ...”

“... when the Bible failed to match his internal conviction the Bible was set aside. Milton may indeed have privately disliked the Decalogue. What is significant is that he felt obliged to argue carefully, using a battery of Biblical allusions, that the Ten Commandments were laid upon the Jews and do not apply to Christians, who come later. So far from ...”

“... refusal to speak at length for her characters, to represent directly, for instance, the rage that may haunt their obedience. She speaks another language, or rather two other languages, English and the language of images. Desai’s awareness of these languages is one answer to the question Tabish Khair puts in his intelligent and argumentative book on ...”

“... doing his best to avoid the hazards and collect the rewards. As the game progresses, the hazards may get harder to avoid, and the rewards increase accordingly. There may also be a number of puzzles to solve, but these aren’t strictly necessary. The first commercial game I played was Snapper, closely modelled on Pac-Man ...”

“... journalism – he had been in Nigeria on a business trip at the time of the strike – and this may explain his failure to protect Cudlipp. But it hardly excuses it. Since his return from the war Cudlipp had raised the Pictorial’s circulation to five million (higher than the Mirror’s, another reason for Bartholomew’s hostility), and his dismissal ...”

“... having done these things, how long it will take to get back home. The trip, in either direction, may take thirty minutes or four hours, or the route may be categorically shut off by soldiers with their loaded submachine guns. The Israeli Government claims that it is obliged to take these measures to combat terrorism. The ...”

“... you can describe what you are feeling as love. Love finally goes beyond reason – someone else may see what you see in your partner while not being in the least in love with him or her – but it is not antithetical to reason, as writers afraid of being robbed of their brooding inwardness by some bloodless theorist sometimes believe of their ...”

“... even discussing a general amnesty or general disarmament and, amazingly, admitted that al-Qaida ‘may not account for most of the violence in Iraq’. The much trumpeted economic ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is no more of a success. The most recent quarterly report to Congress of the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), released in ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”