“... to adopt a minimum ‘secular’ curriculum, and to deny support to extreme sectarian schools. It may not be accidental that this is happening at a time when the settlement ethos, like the place of religion in Israeli society, is being re-evaluated. A left-wing agronomist I know, playing devil’s advocate, argued that ‘Zionism was always about expansion ...”

“... In Desertion, Gurnah has on the whole made these wisely, and very tactfully. And, though it may be difficult, there are rewards. In his Guardian piece, Gurnah explains that he came to the gradual realisation that his own story, of ‘being from one place and living in another’, was worth telling, in part because it was ‘one of the stories of our ...”

“... problem with this argument is that it fails to take into account the possibility that an executive may invoke the state of exception, only then to defy the constitutional limits imposed on that state. Ackerman trusts the executive to bow to the constitution at the very moment it suspends it. More troubling than this contradiction are its consequences: the ...”

“... not a form of ancestor worship? When Shakespeare’s mother telephones from England to announce he may have other relatives in Tasmania, he asks, ‘warily’: ‘Are you sure?’ A sentiment echoed by the reader. A second disgraced profligate great-great uncle emerges. Petre Hordern, a bankrupt gentleman farmer from Devon, is a sympathetic figure, but it’s ...”

“... of those earlier works. (Nor does it have the same translators as most of his other books, which may account for part of the difference.) It is the poet’s notebook: the record of the cities, men and things, the roads in unknown regions, the unexpected meetings and partings, that lie behind his earlier masterpieces set in Africa. And it contains only a very ...”

“... obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story’, and he may be right. What’s ultimately impressive about the book is not its half-assed PoMo comedy – which you can now find in virtually any novel of any genre, except possibly those published by Mills and Boon. Nor is it distinguished particularly for its skilful ...”

“... White Mike survives, and is revealed in an epilogue to have written the novel. McDonell may feel that this ending is a fair judgment on his characters; but I found myself increasingly warming to Sara and Jessica and Timmy and Mark Rothko, and wishing that White Mike would turn his 20:20 moral vision on himself a little more often. There is something ...”

“... liberated constricted lives and fertilised leisure with pleasure. The Industrial Revolution may have transformed Merrie England into Coketown, but it also transported Coketown to Sleary’s Circus. It made people cheerful by making things cheap, administering a sacrament of culture, kitsch and candyfloss. It’s always been a part of the apology for the ...”

“... revelations turn up so often in his best novels that they start to hint nastily at a worldview: we may actually be plot-driven creatures, nothing but the utterances of a structure. This has been the built-in burden of Banks’s plots ever since his first novel. In The Wasp Factory (1984), 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame affably narrates a life spent on a remote ...”

“... Carolus Linnaeus, who was born almost exactly three hundred years ago, on 23 May 1707, was the founder of modern systematics and taxonomy, the sciences of classifying and naming living things. Science has no holy books, but Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae comes close. Its tenth edition, published in Stockholm in 1758, was the starting point of zoological classification, and the binomial system for naming – one for the genus, e ...”

“... wigs in civil but not in criminal cases. If the Bar, again, does not reciprocate, someone may have to get firm with it. The alternative is the Republic’s easygoing process of elective abandonment. Whether retaining wigs in criminal cases will help to anonymise judges who come face to face in court with sometimes very violent people I am not sure. It ...”

“... US demanded that the Palestinians back this vision of their future. Sharon’s ‘peace’ plan may not deviate much from previous Zionist schemes, and yet it seems that things have got worse in Israel during the last few weeks. The assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi, with America’s support for Sharon’s plans in the background, are terrifying ...”

“... a lying memoir from prison, with advice to his publishers on how to promote it. He was hanged in May 1896. Has this lurid tale anything to do with the White City, or was it assumed that a book about the 1893 exhibition might not sell without some spicing up? Perhaps the latter. Yet the juxtaposition generates troubling thoughts and technical challenges. For ...”

“... and his knockabout addenda include an index of ‘key words, phrases and concepts’ that ‘may be used as a substitute for reading the book itself’: Sansom makes the wry suggestion that this would be ‘no bad thing’. Some of these embellishments are borrowed from Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius features jaunty chapter ...”

“... and promising to ask Camden, the lord chancellor, to tell Castlereagh as much. Over the course of May and June 1809, as machinations continued, nobody told Castlereagh, who was preoccupied with illness and with the war. The king did not like Canning, as Hunt puts it, because he was not ‘one of us’: ‘the only member of the cabinet who was neither a lord ...”