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“... of 2 November 2004; it was probably no coincidence that this was also the day when George W. Bush was expected to be voted back into office. Van Gogh was a fourth-generation descendant of the painter, but better known in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands as a film-maker, writer, columnist, chat-show host and all-round controversialist, whose ...”

“... tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore ...”

“... Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from the Board’s ...”

“... Forty years ago​ , Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding ...”

“... before the main features at their local Empire Theatre fleapit. They had listened to the voices of Bush House broadcasters, all black-tie and plummy syllables, crackling out of purple Bakelite radios with great auctoritas. They saw London as a haven of order and stability rather than a soft city which, as their children later envisaged, could be modelled at ...”

“... 9/11 and a faltering economy – not to mention the failure of the Fed’s monetary policy – the Bush Administration has invoked the need for both stimulus and security in order to rationalise a return to Reagan’s old formula of imperial adventure, tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. But the proposed elimination of the tax on ...”

“... published in December 2004 by a clandestine press. But a few weeks before his book appeared, the Bush administration bestowed an honour on him more valuable than anything the jihadi market had to offer: the announcement of a $5 million reward for his capture. Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam ...”

“... Dwellers in the distant villages   Speak of a simple unspoilt girl, Living alone, deep in the bush. Deep in the bush we found her,   Large and innocent of eye, Among gentle gibbons and mountain ferns. Perfect for the part, perfect,   Except for the dropsy Which comes from polished rice. In the capital our film ...”

“... with workaday portraits of 15th-century life and death. Aridjis’s narrator tends to move as Peter Greenaway’s camera, sideways rather than in and out. We are, it seems, to take at face value most of what this picaro tells us, as if his theme is too important for us to be left in any doubt over something as trifling and ‘literary’ as whether or not ...”

“... and eventual thwarting – of apolitical humanitarianism was most starkly evident under George W. Bush. Campaigning in New Hampshire in 2000, Bush promised he would never use the denial of food as an instrument of foreign policy. He picked Andrew Natsios as his administrator of USAID: a figure with extensive experience both ...”

“... plausibly argued that ‘moral issues’ (i.e. abortion and homosexual marriage) won George W. Bush his second term in office. The passion with which these opinions are held is almost always inversely correlated to knowledge of the facts, even in the holder’s own country: most of the public discourse on the relations between men, women and their ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... English origins. Should the fallen Petkanov have been put on trial? The new regime, personified by Peter Solinsky, the Prosecutor General, is torn between its desire for vengeance and a belief in fair play and the rule of law. Petkanov, who together with Solinsky’s father was once imprisoned by his country’s Fascists, despises the liberals who have ...”

“... or ‘batrachian’, as Sanda Miller more obscurely puts it in an almost apt comparison – bush-baby is closer) grotesquely engulf most of her cheeks. The projecting lips of The White Negress are a caricature. Brancusi does things which would give a cartoonist reason to pause, and manages to make of them something which is witty, not coarsely ...”

“... killed, one assumes, by a Beirut sniper. Richard meanwhile has given up the struggle in the bush for a quieter life in Bush House. Politically, News from Nowhere is over-poweringly pessimistic. Nowhere is where the struggle ends up. But its abstract conclusions will not, I think, constitute the novel’s main interest ...”