“... 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 ...”

“... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...”

“... this is one thing we know for sure – we will be absent; a nationalist, nativist anxiety that (white) English kids will lose their identity when they are forced to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 World-Telegram ran an eight-part autobiography of the new star. (‘My full name is Joseph Peter Di Maggio Jr,’ it began, and thus, Cramer says, ‘Joe attained his first major league record: youngest player ever to get his own name wrong in his autobiography.’ He was Joseph Paul, son of Giuseppe. The space in ‘Di Maggio’ makes another ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 45 degrees in Thuringia. The remaining six ships returned in disarray to their bases. For Captain Peter Strasser, the Bomber Harris of the German Naval Airship Division, this was Black October; serious raiding now fell to the huge Gotha biplanes. The bomb-load an airship could carry had always been trivial in relation to the size of the carrier; a fair ...”

“... rather than trying to transcend them. Mercifully, he isn’t above cinema’s temptations. Here is Peter Mullan being unduly harsh on My Name Is Joe, his collaboration with Loach: The problem with the social realists is that they want to have their cake and eat it. They maintain that their films are in a social-realist style and therefore credible, but ...”

“... 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 ...”