“... inexpressible’, ‘loftiest rhyme’ – which could be deliberate. But he does not note that we may also hear the general imitation of Wordsworth’s mode. Tennyson must have had in the back of his mind this, or some similar passage from Wordsworth: The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but ...”

“... the jewel of Beirut has little chance. It’s possible to be charitable about Solidere. Brashness may be the only way to get things done. ‘Nobody agrees on anything here’ is something all Beirutis agree on. (One downtown building had 4080 owners and 780 tenants.) ‘But you can’t reconstruct a city and exclude its inhabitants from the ...”

“... Radio’. (Bambi: ‘Filth.’ Casablanca: ‘This movie is filth.’ Cat People: ‘A race may civilise itself by language, not film. Cat People is filth.’) At least Eggers and his associates seem to be having fun. And in You Shall Know Our Velocity, his first novel, he has some more. YSKOV – as it’s inevitably known – has abandoned most of the ...”

“... for the expatriate Iraqi opposition, it has always been a motley bunch. Its leader Ahmad Chalabi may be a brilliant man but he has been found guilty of fraud in Jordan and has no real constituency beyond Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon office. He and his helpers – Kanan Makiya, for example, the man who said that news of the merciless high-altitude US bombing ...”

“... not just by presidents and coups, but also by ordinary interactions: ‘The professional historian may prefer . . . large-scale conflicts between nations and classes, wars, revolutions . . . but what is really much more significant are the innumerable daily contacts between individuals . . . which are the true substance of social life.’ Gregorio also finds ...”

“... live – to seem to forget you – it is to feed my pain – and so that this seeming forgetting may spring forth more painfully in tears, at a given moment, in the midst of this life, when you appear to me in it * time – that body takes to obliterate itself in earth – (to merge little by little with neutral earth on the vast horizons) it is then that ...”

“... or trade. This is World History in which most of the world plays the role of victim. Some readers may feel that I am expressing what is sometimes considered the professional deformation of the Africanist – a refusal to face facts. If historical work on epidemics focuses on Euro-America’s domination of the world and on its achievements in ...”

“... noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about anything more sinister than the Beverly Hillbillies. Or, in the words of the narrator of Tomato Red ...”

“... She knew you were lying and sleeping around. Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. Way too philosophical for me. Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue. That I understand. So did she. Now there you’re wrong. Why do you say so. I saw her go down. She was far stronger than me. She went down. Everything I ...”

“... restauranteur’, Jakle and Sculle assert, has become ‘the creator of place’. This may always have been so, but with the fracturing of the institutions of family and neighbourhood, and the growth of urban sprawl, the restaurant is now one of the few spaces left that can provide a ‘sense of place’: As social beings we are a function of the ...”

“... in the 1870s inspired Tennyson’s poem ‘Montenegro’, which was published in May 1877, on the front page of the Nineteenth Century, accompanied by a long essay on Montenegrin history by Gladstone, who had encouraged Tennyson in the role of ‘Montenegro’s Byron’. Earlier that month, in a speech in the Commons lasting two and a half ...”

“... when national legal systems are unable or unwilling to act. The potential crimes with which Saddam may be charged – torture, mass rape and murder, armed aggression, the use of chemical weapons, the mistreatment of prisoners of war and perhaps even genocide – are all proscribed by treaty and custom. They are international crimes in both severity and ...”

“... that we cannot hear the music of the spheres because of our muddy vesture of decay, but we may sense that order in starlit Belmont, at least until Portia and Nerissa arrive to tease their new husbands and allow slightly dirty jokes about their rings. The whole splendid act is still inexplicably sad, and, from the point of view of the basic story, close ...”

“... on the whole they do well, but have no wider or critical sense of what the government is up to. It may be that the decay of the cabinet under Blair simply continues a long constitutional process: that the problem is wider than just the character of the Labour Party. But the docility of the present cabinet has to do with more than constitutional process: it is ...”

“... way. First, though, he wrote a tremendously bad novel called The Dwarves of Death (1990), which may be a source of embarrassment: there’s no book called ‘The Midgets of Mortality’ on Michael Owen’s fictional CV. The Dwarves of Death is definitely interested in pop music, demotic and storytelling, but it’s a throwaway effort that seems to have been ...”