“... them; in 1918, Britain used mustard gas against Germany and dropped gas bombs in support of the White forces against the Red Army the following year. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol was signed prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in war, but without banning production and stockpiling. By then, the Soviet chemical weapons programme was in full swing: the ...”

“... involved, among other things, a little larceny and a little prostitution, and hanging out with Peter Rachman in London. The narrator also knows Rachman, and indeed visits a number of his properties with him. We see a memorable series of snapshots of broken-down flats and houses, the battered London equivalent of the shabby Paris immeubles Modiano so ...”

“... the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and laid beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of ...”

“... Blanchard Jerrold asserted in 1883, alongside ‘The Association for the Total Suppression of White Hats! The Anti-Flower-in-the-Button-Hole League! The Society for the Abolition of Green-Tea Drinking! The Association for the Restriction of Glove Fastenings to One Button! The Local Option Snuff Confederation!’ – and Durbach is forced to admit that ...”

“... it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife – or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare wife.’) In 1939, having decided to leave Inniskeen for good, he moved to Dublin, and for the rest of his life earned a shaky living as a journalist. He published the ...”

“... Patrick Creagh in his Picture of Tristan (1965), Val Wamer in The Centenary Corbière (1974) and Peter Dale in Narrow Straits (1985). All these versions add something to our knowledge of Corbière’s genius, though the best are the imitations by Patrick Creagh. ‘Le Poète contumace’ is a colloquial-ironic self-portrait, written against the grain of ...”

“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... ago: we wouldn’t even have been able to distinguish a modern digital signal from background white noise. SETI is maintained, nevertheless, in the hope that we will receive transmissions we can recognise as such. The account of SETI in XTL (a zippy acronym for Extra-Terrestrial Life) is more technically detailed, and lacks Jack&Ian’s scepticism. But ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... and guidelines that determine what research is approved. Thanks to the clinical ethics movement, white-coated bioethicists work in hospitals and medical schools – advising doctors and nurses, writing notes on patients’ charts. Bioethicists serve as consultants to managed care organisations, advisers to non-profit medical foundations, and expert witnesses ...”

“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... And then it begins … on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon at all … And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. On a ...”

“... one way, Orme’s book presents us with a record of spirited resistance. As a boy in the 1520s, Peter Carew was sent to school at Exeter, staying in the household of a city alderman. He grew to hate his host, and one day played truant from school, scaling the city walls. He was found high up on a turret, threatening to throw himself off to get the alderman ...”

“... in connection with four murders. He is offered wine, and not just any wine but the 2004 white that Commandant Danglard sources from a small grower in the Sancerrois. The suspect enjoys the wine, asking if he can have the details of the supplier. But he’s still reluctant to talk, reluctant above all to cry in front of the cops. They promise him ...”

“... was deployed to argue that there were hierarchies of freedom: some kinds of people – basically, white ones (though East Asians were sometimes allowed a look-in) – were better suited to it than others. The argument went that we can live free and prosper so long as we stick to doing business with our own kind. When we start bending over backwards to let all ...”