“... be realised, if I happen to get my hands on a guitar when I’m very drunk. And a similar yearning may have played its part in the signing up of first novels by Willy Vlautin, the lead singer of the band Richmond Fontaine, and Will Ashon, who runs Big Dada Recordings: both will be published by Faber later in the year. You wouldn’t catch Ludmilla, the ...”

“... well-meaning: ‘If we go back far enough in time, almost everyone living in Britain today may be seen to have their origins elsewhere … Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeing persecution and conflict.’ Well, yes and no. But the fun really starts when you get to the descriptions of everyday domestic ...”

“... Kim, you may remember, leaves school to work for the Survey of India. I have no idea how many of the Survey’s employees were spies, but one of them did do the kind of secret work Kipling describes. He was a schoolmaster, Nain Singh. In 1865 he entered Tibet – forbidden to foreigners on pain of death – disguised as a lama, and mapped Lhasa ...”

“... own starveling country want two more of these vagrant landing-strips, whatever the asking price may turn out to be? Two reasons come to mind, both unworthy. We want them because when you choose to go to war they allow you to conduct hostilities, in part at least, extra-territorially, launching air attacks from out to sea without there being any serious risk ...”

“... is very much an initiative of the left. The Second International Cittaslow Conference was held in May, in the neighbouring fishing villages of Pioppi and Acciaroli, part of the commune of Pollica in the Cilento national park, fifty miles down the coast from Salerno. Cittaslow is an international network of small towns, established in Orvieto during the 1999 ...”

“... into the blogosphere and the rest of the internet along a chain of endlessly forking paths. That may well sound like your idea of a nightmare, which is just one of the many reasons the internet isn’t going to make books obsolete anytime soon. Publishing an anthology of blogs in book form, then, would appear to make about as much sense as broadcasting ...”

“... which seems to proceed by intuition. Work of this kind is inevitably uneven, but the theatre may still be something to relish. Her paintings invoke turbulent and transgressive sensory experiences – they seem to come in and out of focus, slowly revealing recognisable details. Looking at her churning surfaces, I was reminded of Hannah Sullivan’s poem ...”

“... Instead her task is to recognise who the baby is for her or himself, even though what that may mean is something neither of them can know in advance. Perhaps it’s because this uncertainty is hard to tolerate that ‘His Majesty the Baby’ continues to wield such power. During the grand royal tour in April this year, we were given a daily dose, as ...”

“... early in the Bush presidency by oil lobbyists and executives and issued from the White House in May 2001, appeared to provide an explicit set of justifications – predictions, even – for the shedding of blood for oil. It estimated that US oil consumption (in 2000, this was more than 1100 gallons of petrol per capita, over a quarter of global ...”

“... of being a spy or a commando, then transferred to a naval prison, where he remained until late May, when he was cleared after an investigation. A month later he boarded a ship to London with a group of eighty other French citizens. ‘The volunteer Grumbach produced a very good impression,’ his interrogator in London wrote, and issued him a Number One ...”

“... all this with his one-stop dispossession of livelihood, civic status and homeland. By the end of May 1939, nearly 100,000 Jews had left Austria, most through his good offices.He was becoming expert at moving people around and learning at the same time how difficult it was to carry out policy when the higher-ups were at loggerheads. Heydrich appointed him ...”

“... and assisting African leaders, with very few conditions, much as France used to do, and while they may not fight to the death for real democracy in their country, Gabonese nowadays rise up in revolt at the idea of a leader being ‘elected in Paris’. France’s backing has become a mixed blessing for the son of its late satrap. Before he was elected, Ali ...”

“... his romantic revolutionary credentials early on in the book by remarking that: Official Britain may have its Valhalla of heroes and statesmen and conquerors and empire-builders, but we know that the highest point ever reached by European civilisation was in the city of Basel in 1912, when the leaders of the socialist parties of all countries met to ...”

“... in living’, Holbrook said, and quoted Grigson’s view with approval: ‘His poetry as near as may be is the poetry of a child, volcanic, and unreasoning.’ These remarks pick up on Thomas’s own line in self-representation, a fascination with premature experience which was manifest not just in his life and letters but in his poems too. ‘Now as I was ...”

“... concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when he came home from the Franco-Prussian War, got a job as a government ...”