“... Worsthorne, Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh are, pro tem, in favour of the mosque against secular, brown activists of the Rushdie type? It is depressing to notice how much of the commentary in this matter depends on the unstated false antithesis between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’. Some parts of the Muslim world, after all, experienced the presentiments of ...”

“... adopted by more than thirty states, the Antisemitism Awareness Act is an expression of what Susan Neiman, writing about Germany’s suppression of support for Palestinian rights, has called ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’, and will almost certainly lead to more antisemitism, since it treats Jewish students as a privileged minority whose feelings of ...”

“... as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”

“... not that long ago. The filming marine is breathing heavily. He climbs out of the trench into a brown winter wood where every branch has been snapped and torn by bullets and shrapnel. Later, he will upload this to the internet.There is a terrible, bleak genre of video in which soldiers at the threshold of death film themselves; a kind of farewell message to ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge dog, Gozo, so fierce that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its ...”

“... hallway, waiting for someone … She often wrote with her eyes closed, which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use for their argument that she was ‘essentially a trance writer’. The debate about how ‘instinctive’ (therefore less impressive to some) her process was doesn’t seem to me to be the best way of evaluating the books, though it would be ...”