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“... front, a smokescreen for whatever villainy went on in the back room. There were yards of heaped white goods, damaged and dripping acid, being made ready, so I was told, for export to Nigeria. Fleets of cars with dubious paperwork were being sliced and reattached by the crusher’s equivalent of Dr Frankenstein’s scalpel. Otherwise, the only action came ...”

“... when the tide was turning against the values of the ‘free world’, which in those days meant white minority rule. The MPLA was strictly a Marxist-Leninist movement with a non-starter economic policy and, as time went on, a penchant for self-enrichment. Like Islam and Christianity in many parts of Africa, Marxism-Leninism was a malleable ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... single abstention. Unanimity was secured, but a hitch arose at the next stage. The French told the White House that while they could not accept a second Security Council resolution explicitly authorising an attack on Iraq, which would implicate them, they had no objection to a US invasion based on an American interpretation of 1441 – the course that Cheney ...”

“... by a housewife. As a way of clearing her mind, a woman makes use of a weekend when her husband, Richard, is away, to set down on paper what has been happening over the previous months. Stella, a teenager, just out of high school, comes to stay as a guest of the family. Under the eyes of his wife, Richard seduces ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, these stories helped to establish contemporary rape myths by picturing a pure, white, middle or upper-class victim assailed by a poor black who attacked his betters by dirtying their proudest possession – their women. The legacy of this stereotype is still with us. The fascination of the press with the Portuguese character of New Bedford ...”

“... behind the point of intersection, one board is deflected by 30 degrees; the colours are black, white, touches of grey, and the natural colour of the wood. It must be one of the few sculptures in the world every aspect of which – there are essentially eight aspects, each at a point of the compass – presents a view which works and a view which is totally ...”

“... all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face. Little white-washed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of ...”

“... is also a jumper in, a superb starter. What about the opening of The Hind and the Panther? A Milk white Hind, immortal and unchang’d, Fed on the lawns and in the forest rang’d. Or of Absalom and Achitophel? In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin, When man on many multiplied his kind, Ere one to one was cursedly ...”

“... to the masculine canon was a drawing, a doodle really, by Dorothy, Lady Burlington, the wife of Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, a great patron of art and architecture to whom Pope dedicated the last of his Moral Essays. Lady Burlington sketched Pope at a game of cards – perhaps ombre (aptly enough, an Englishing of the Spanish for ‘man’), the game ...”

“... cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of white wine, and is wielding what looks like a butter knife. Semyon is mostly bald and has a greying goatee. His eyelids weigh heavy, which makes him look a little angry, or maybe just tired. His cutlery is untouched, and his arms are hidden under the table, as if ...”

“... and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when ...”

“... all the more fiercely protected for that. More controversial was the war cemetery with its rows of white and black crosses: white for those who had died fighting for France, black for the boys who had been taken off in lorries from their classes one day for conscription into Hitler’s armies and had never returned. It was a ...”

“... major presidential candidate has ever had, and is mistrusted even by her natural constituency – white, educated, middle-aged, female registered Democrats – not to mention right-wing evangelical male yahoos in the red states who’ll be goddamned before they vote for some pushy left-wing bitch. In March, Obama had drawn a crowd of ten thousand or so ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”