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“... Street, two hundred girls turned out in their night attire into the winter cold. Her face was white, her eyes were staring; she whispered: ‘I put him in the wardrobe.’The expense of travelling, the logistical manoeuvres required, the wear and tear on the nerves, meant that the visits had to be well spaced out. And gradually, I realised that my world ...”

“... Government of Vietnam to permit him a relay station.) Until Saddam’s ruffians cut off the line, Peter Arnett, the intrepid New Zealander who must now be the world’s senior war correspondent, was providing actuality from Baghdad. I once met Arnett and was fascinated to learn that it had been he, interviewing the American officer in charge of the Ben Tre ...”

“... with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its gender all ...”

“... of Harlem with Mayor John Lindsay might be interpreted as supporting the political ambitions of a white politician in need of black votes. Rap Brown ‘lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong’. Brando took Brown’s point that, ‘despite a lifetime of searching, curiosity and ...”

“... as one resistance movement achieves some success, others take heart. Because of Algeria’s large white population the French hoped to retain their colony there after Tunisia and Morocco had won their independence: the ferocious Algerian war of independence was the result. The British fondly imagined that they would still be running Africa decades after India ...”

“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... the prisoner of a past in which unemployment mattered far more than in 1960, as a man who betrayed white minorities all over Africa, replacing them by regimes which found gardens and turned them into deserts, as the creator of a dozen or more second-rate universities, and, above all, as the man who missed the chance to halt inflation. The resignation of the ...”

“... films we see on TV as ET squiffily flicks from channel to channel is a clip (but why in black and white?) from This Island Earth, one of the most poetic and inventive of 1950s sci-fi movies, in which the desperation of the aliens and their finally sympathetic nature are something of a precedent for this film. It is no coincidence either that there is one from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the kind of school I attended but mainly because Britain’s postwar economy created so many white collar jobs in the public and service sectors that it required no unusual ability or hard work or overwhelming ambition to fill one of them: they sucked us in like a sponge. That was the pull factor. Pushing us was something we heard our fathers ...”

“... Terror gave way to bored misery; moral absolutism to irony. Things stopped looking so black and white. In The Zone, Dovlatov maintains a deadpan tone, without a trace of melodrama. The writer-narrator tells his editor: I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters. And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil ...”

“... rates and restrictions on currency movements was to deal with a crook called Kourillo, ‘a Peter Lorre character’ who was ‘barely five feet tall’ and had a handshake ‘like an empty glove’. (When Kourillo later betrayed him, Fry took out a murder contract and forced him out of Marseille.) A strange and colourful group assembled in ...”

“... Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball League Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. By no coincidence, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy – on the Jay Leno Tonight show – on the day Issa withdrew. It was clear from the outset that if a ‘No on Recall’ vote supporting Davis failed to pass by even a slight ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... to catch some telltale sign of intelligence chiming in at the special frequency. He heard mostly white noise; one heart-thumping squawk, he later realised, came not from the sky but from a top-secret military installation nearby. Not easily discouraged, he attracted colleagues to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes ...”