“... the very edge of the plateau and is about to slither down Marston Hill into the valley.So: to the north the barbed-wire perimeter fence of the airfield; to the south the steep slope of the valley ending in the brickworks. There was nowhere to walk to any more. If now you want to wander around, you are forced to parade up the High Street and back, past the ...”

“... offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century ...”

“... Greek and Roman drama to Shakespeare. The English Moralists were to be headed by Plato, Aristotle, Paul and Augustine. What was being traced was a genuine ancestry of thought and form, with the linguistic connections assumed from the habits of the private schools. It is not so much this cultural connection that counts: it is the long gap, in the ...”

“... from it – but they’ve fallen away from the natural world and been reassigned to human beings. Paul Keegan put this well in a remark about the changing temper of ‘nature writing’ in recent years. ‘The threatening in nature,’ he wrote, ‘has been exchanged for the idea of nature under threat’ (LRB, 20 July 1995). At the same time, Keegan ...”

“... Japan. There, the building that kicked off Brutalism was the Yale Art and Architecture Building by Paul Rudolph, a sculptural, self-conscious monument lined in ‘corduroy concrete’. The ethic, here, was wholly architectural – a ‘truth to materials’, an ‘expression of structure’ and, especially, an expression of the building’s technical ...”

“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... pressure and persuasion, for much of 1983 the pressure intensified: American B-52s flew over the North Pole; Nato played nuclear war games near the East German border. Even so, he grew convinced that the US could not keep pressuring the Soviets without risking a third world war – a risk brought home to him by The Day After. With the express purpose of ...”

“... Rot’ school of penology on this side of the Atlantic. With ideological encouragement from North America, the support of his Prime Minister and the acquiescence of the Labour Party, he has reinvigorated the arguments for the coercive and punitive aspects of sentencing, and made good his promise to Tory delegates not to flinch from sending people to ...”

“... France between 27 March 1942 and 22 August 1944: Convoy One, Drancy, the main transit camp on the north-east outskirts of Paris, to Auschwitz, 1112 men, mostly French nationals, none chosen for immediate gassing, 22 survivors in 1945, through Convoy 46, 9 February 1943, 1000 deportees, of whom 816 were gassed on arrival and 22 survived (15 men, seven ...”

“... scornful description of some American prisoners of war, cleaned up and paraded before her by her North Vietnamese hosts. The American boys were uncouth and uncultured, she complained, capable of expressing interest only in how the Chicago Cubs were doing. (It might have occurred to her that prisoners in danger of being beaten and tortured might well be ...”

“... by the police for refusing to comply with segregation laws. He served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina in 1947 for his part in the first Freedom Ride organised by the Congress of Racial Equality and wrote a chilling account of the experience. Altogether, he was arrested 24 times. He adhered always to the principle of non-violence and this brought ...”

“... was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the year’ (not least because it took half of BBC2’s entire drama budget to ...”

“... cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question ...”

“... explode in blood and there will be an exodus of yet more refugees. They are – from south-east to north-west – Artsakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the two Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and Transnistria. Crimea, now formally annexed into the Russian Federation, is a borderline case. None of them is recognised as a sovereign state except by one ...”

“... right.31 May. A late birthday present, a mug dated January 1889, commemorates the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds when I was a boy, the notion that there ...”