“... his policies are acted on. He appears to have the stomach for continued leadership, however: his close ally, the Speaker of the upper house, Vladimir Shumeiko, has proposed a prolongation of Presidential and Parliamentary terms by two years – a move which many see as the determination of the new political class to cling to office for as long as ...”

“... the process of his writing should flatten them, and be seen to do so. Gurnah’s novel, though, close as it sticks to Daud’s sorely-tried consciousness, chooses to operate at a third-person distance, and thus takes on a greater responsibility in terms of roundedness for Catherine. The chief difficulty comes with Catherine’s dialogue, which reproduces ...”

“... large and universal that it burns off all family chills. When Vidia intimates that he has become close to an Englishwoman, his father, after warning against mixed marriages, concludes his letter: ‘the only thing that matters to me – and to all of us at home – is your happiness.’ In some respects Seepersad Naipaul must have been an ideal father: on ...”

“... to such a friendship; the Oxford Movement pullulated with passionate attachments; two of the most frank avowals, which Richard Jenkyns quotes in his masterly study of the Victorian conception of Ancient Greece, came from Disraeli. Of course there were in the Nineties the Uranians and the aesthetes, disciples of Cory or Symonds or Carpenter, who justified ...”

“... to read him or consult him.GP: Do you enjoy reading him?TP: I haven’t really read one, to be frank. I haven’t even read A Human Document, as book.GP: So when you bought it, you started work on it straight away?TP: I found things of interest in it. I didn’t realise it would go on so long. I’m still doing it.GP: Will it ever be finished?TP: I’ve ...”

“... was never permitted to become a defining feature of Irish Catholic culture.’ Frank Duff, who founded the Legion of Mary and was perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the time, ‘was an able defender of the Jewish community’, as were some of his colleagues. Anti-semitism in Ireland was kept on the fringes of the Catholic ...”

“... gunning the lines. I’ve never had a hand grenade thrown at me, but a rifle grenade struck rather close. Maybe I’ll get a hand grenade later. He could never laugh at the young man he had been. He laughed instead at the writers the young man had read and who were kind to him. The epigraph to The Torrents of Spring is from Fielding: ‘The only source of the ...”

“... to be to see what fresh daily complaint you can hurl at my hot head’. Yet they were remarkably close. Both rose early – often at 4 a.m. – and both had a strong desire to be useful. After resisting for many years, Waldorf allowed her to convert him to Christian Science, to which she had turned after a bout of persistent bad health. ‘It couldn’t be ...”

“... worked between creels. Maxwell’s last book, Raven Seek Thy Brother is a darker, more frank affair. It opens on the hillside above Camusfeàrna, now forested, with Maxwell ‘surveying what I had done to Camusfeàrna … what I had done to the animals and what I had done to myself’. He presents two photographs. In the first, the house in ...”

“... Fish’, the rainbow-bird of ‘Sonnet’, the ‘multi-coloured’ stones catching the sun at the close of ‘The End of March’. In ‘Santarém’, intriguingly, it is a certain Mr Swan who demands ‘What’s that ugly thing?’ when he spies the empty wasps’ nest that Bishop admired so much in the ‘blue pharmacy’ that the pharmacist gave the nest ...”

“... begins 15 blocks north); and Kazin’s apartment at 111th Street is said to be conveniently close to the George Washington Bridge, which is in fact at 186th Street and nearby only to a fanatical walker like Kazin. These are extremely minor things but they lead you to wonder whether Cook has ever been to New York. Similarly, he doesn’t seem that ...”

“... dogs; once the hounds have ripped them apart, their market value is decreased. Hannah’s novel is frank about the sexual abuse of black women, which reinforces the South’s ‘domestic institution’ by breeding more slaves, and in addition poisons the marriages of the whites. She describes how white mistresses and black maids grow ...”

“... In the 1964 film Robin and the Seven Hoods, when someone compares ‘Robbo’ (Frank Sinatra) to Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds ...”

“... the decades proceed, the possibilities shift. When a male graduate student joins the programme – Frank S. Hogg is his Mad Magazine name – he ends up with the new Pickering Fellow from Mount Holyoke, Miss Sawyer. They both keep working, and Sawyer goes on to win a prestigious prize. Later Bart Bok, just 22, turns up, and is starry-eyed for Miss ...”

“... backed the creation of a committee to investigate the CIA’s domestic spying, headed by Senator Frank Church. But the committee also came across evidence of the CIA coup in Chile, as well as the Kennedy brothers’ efforts to have Fidel Castro assassinated. Church, an aspiring presidential candidate and devotee of Camelot, chose not to look too closely into ...”