“... Westerns of Jack Schaefer, King Solomon’s Mines, The Lost World, Kidnapped, The Sign of Four, Rob Roy, The Day the Cowboys Quit and so on. Popeye, Charlemagne, road movies, the Knights of the Round Table, the Trojan Wars, pirate tales, the Bible, Montezuma, American World War Two bomber raids, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to ...”

“... more intimate affair than, say, proportional representation; but the post-colonial critic Robert Young has recently reminded us of just what racist, imperial baggage this apparently suggestive notion carries with it from the anthropologising 19th century. Jacqueline Rose has her own suspicions of that brand of literary politics for which culture is ...”

“... in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of her own. In One for My Baby Alfie’s misfortune leads him to wish he had children, to reassess his relationship with his parents, and to ...”

“... whom he described as the first ‘good woman’ he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later ...”

“... buried opposite the Elephant and Castle, Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, whom she implores her young audience of Newnham and Girton students to allow to ‘put on the body which she has so often laid down’. The novel, Woolf believes, is the form that suits women best: less burdened by male tradition, easier to write while distracted (remember Jane ...”

“... that began on 2 March, later raising the total to more than three hundred. Among the dead was a young man who worked in the Thai restaurant round the corner from my house. His family, like so many others, is in mourning. The last five weeks of Israel-Hizbullah warfare have produced more than five thousand Lebanese casualties. When I walked home from dinner ...”

“... and to equalise consumption, inhibited the competitive urge and with it the desire to steal, rob, burgle or attack neighbours and friends in adversity. But was this true? What did ‘criminals do during the war’? Anyone seeking the answer to this question, as indeed to other questions of a more comprehensive kind, will have difficulty finding it in ...”

“... housewives’ larders to make sure that they had no more than a week’s food’; ‘I drove young women round town, sending them into shops to see if they could trick the assistants into supplying goods off ration’; ‘I was sent to jail for hiding my Canadian Army lover in a wall cupboard for a month’; ‘I blew safes in the Blitz, relying on bombs ...”

“... the exercise just one more example of cultural arrogance: ‘I had often wondered secretly what a young American could teach the Chinese farmers who had been farming for generations on the same land and by the most skilful use of fertilisers and irrigation were still able to produce extraordinary yields.’ But farmers welcomed conversations about seed ...”

“... to disregard this; it is self-contradictory in the Cretan Liar tradition, and in any case it would rob her of any sense of purpose in life. Dora, like several of Pullinger’s characters, is living on the dole and therefore has a stronger need to fend off her suspicion of the pointlessness of it all than any of Barthelme’s figures. Tiny Lies is a ...”

“... manners. In Aleph’s duetting with Harvey we are to hear a song of foolish innocence, sung by two young people about to trip over the threshold of life, not an idiom resonant with social and educational privilege. The ‘king-size sheet from Liberty’s sale’ which serves as the best table-cloth at Clifton is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to ...”

“... the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years. In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed ...”

“... of safety first. But the importance of Jewish resisters is striking: there were Communists and Young Communists, MOE (Main d’Oeuvre Etrangère) some of whom spoke only or mostly Yiddish, Jewish boy-scouts who turned into maquisards, Jewish petites mains from the clothing industries who turned into urban guerrillas. There were also freelance recruits to ...”

“... almost always men, are quietly, diligently at work in Melville’s films: they break safes and rob banks, organise escapes from prisons and moving trains, prepare themselves to commit murder. These wordless longueurs aren’t entirely silent. Melville orchestrated ticking clocks, footsteps, barking dogs, rain and wind. He also used music sparely to ...”

“... Burns the Radical (2002), which shows how the American Revolution formed his opinions when he was young, and shaped his expectations of the French Revolution. Patrick Scott Hogg would like Burns to have been an active member of the Dumfries branch of the radical group Friends of the People in 1793; he may have been, but the proof isn’t ...”