“... Arabia, of course, it is important to preface all remarks with a personal disclaimer. The Saudis may officially be America’s friends and allies in the latest Gulf War but serious discussion quickly reveals their doubts. Mr Bush’s assertion that the ‘American way of life’ was at stake in the Gulf troubled the rulers of Kuwait as well as Saudi ...”

“... Highbury becomes an impossible place to return to and, anyway, we all have to stay at home. It may be uncanny, even absurd, but we have discovered a clear connection between our sealed room and Emma’s Highbury. On appearances no two places on the face of the earth could be more different. Our room looks like an ‘installation’ by Beuys or a wrapped-up ...”

“... that it is all for the good. But I doubt if anything has changed. The targets of Hughes’s scorn may be reeling now but his analysis remains topical and they will soon be back. The art machine will crank itself up for another round of frenzied business. For it to do otherwise, to shrink, to look about for criteria other than fashion, would be inimical to the ...”

“... Japanese. When befriended by two sailors, almost the first thing that occurs to him is that they may want to eat him. There are scenes in the latter part of the book, when Jim is hallucinated by exhaustion and hunger, that owe a good deal to the author’s interest in Science Fiction. Typical of them are a sudden fall of hail after the defeated Japanese have ...”

“... was a genius at knowing the young pilots and airmen ... He was my mentor and guide, and if I may say so, almost my second sight in all the difficult tasks that came in future years ... The Flying Corps owed to this man much more than they know or think.’ Baring’s own account of these years, in Flying Corps Headquarters 1914-1918 (1920), is in many ...”

“... that he did not chance his arm, drop the spanner and risk living entirely by the pen. His readers may feel some doubt about this. Life at the Woolwich, eventually near the top of the organisation, very likely gave him certain satisfactions hardly accessible to the full-time writer. For example, we have here a description of his Augean struggles when the deeds ...”

“... or a shell on the white strand’. Every change of tide erases the drawing or the legend. This may appear a small beginning for a play, but it is enough to sustain, especially in the two last scenes of In Sand, a powerful allegory of order and chaos; of knowledge and the trouble it has to contend ...”

“... arrogant technology has eroded the mystery which is the true basis of religion. The Holy Sepulchre may disappoint some, but for him it is a testimony to the unknowable and to our own insignificance. In my third year at Cambridge a pupil of his at Trinity and myself used to dine with him once a week. I don’t remember him talking much about history. But ...”

“... anxious for more close-ups and a more minute examination of the Queen’s immediate environment may resent the clutter of political narrative. Tarsicio de Azcona’s 1964 biography retains its place as a mine of factual information and source material. Liss does not take full advantage of the work that has been done on the reign in the ...”

“... Terkel’s previous, less jaundiced collections, this one takes shape from a thesis; and one may sometimes wonder whether the oral historian is passing off his own disenchantment with the direction of American society as the representative voice of the country. Terkel himself, moreover, undercuts his own disillusion. Once he has presented his thesis, in ...”

“... execution from the Mississippi Governor. He did not succeed, but the documentary Fourteen Days in May, restored the issue of the death penalty to public consciousness, as did the sequel The Journey, which established Johnson’s innocence of the crime for which he had been executed. Thomas adds flesh to the outline traced in the documentaries; a compelling ...”

“... to be your body, and it ought to be your voice. *** The parent helps the child discover what may be done with its lips and its limbs. This is the first poetry. *** A sort of night then falls – a melancholy mercy – after which the initiation is mysteriously forgotten. This is the primal erasure. *** The remainder of our lives is spent in recapturing ...”

“... stories upon stories’ with a nostalgia for innocent, childhood reading experiences it may be because the official narratives of Western culture, like the Bible and Homer, tend to be historical and chronological rather than merely accumulative. Before the 20th century the influence of our greatest model of the heaped, embedded narrative – the ...”

“... unprepossessing. Most chimps doubt that they are intelligent, or even sentient. Feral humans may have a language, but if they do it’s rudimentary. In the whole course of the novel, none of them says anything except ‘fuck off.’ That, however, is something that they say very often. It’s not always certain that Self knows when he isn’t being ...”

“... loyalty was to the King personally, and express great contempt for the German Emperor, although it may well be that these are sentiments picked up from a prevailing climate of British opinion. The 127th Baluchis, whose trenches were only a few yards away from the German lines, took to throwing stones at the enemy, which were promptly returned. ‘It is a fine ...”