“... people were speechless and sputtered with emotion to see me there. And not only old friends but young people whom I had never seen before.’ The modesty, surprise and sense of a home ‘made strange’ are almost those of a young boy, or an old man whose legend is his parallel life. These glimpses of Renoir’s presence ...”

“... his French mentors in his reportorial prose, in Hiroshima Notes. He tells the real-life story of a young man who was a child in Hiroshima in 1945. In his late teens he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and given two years to live. In those two years he did live, worked hard and happily, and got engaged. Then he died. His fiancée visited the hospital to thank ...”

“... appears to give Liston a better part in the off-beat title story of his new, third collection. A young amateur boxer hoping to go forward to the Chicago Golden Gloves competition finds himself frustrated by the truculence of his stepfather and the indifference of his mother to almost everything but the application of the green paste of her nightly face ...”

“... to them. This tactic of self-subsuming has worked for other writers, but in the hands of the young Merrill, in ‘The Broken Bowl’ for example, it produces verse that is impacted and evasive: The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor Cut structures in the air, Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose ...”

“... included the 40-year-old Fuller, ‘in a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old son. All three died when they were swept overboard in a storm after an agonising 12-hour wait for rescue when their ship foundered on a sand bar within sight of shore at ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... and illustrated popular accounts of current science that are food and drink for the enquiring young. A dozen topics are considered here that would never have been included in such a book fifteen years ago: the limits to growth, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, the fuel and agriculture crisis of tropical countries, the significance of ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... In the extracts from David Stockman’s memoirs published on Monday 14 April by Newsweek, Reagan’s former Budget Director spoke of the mediocrities, charlatans and power-hungry politicos who cluster around the disturbingly vague and incompetent Great Communicator. For them, Stockman said, ‘reality-time’ was the seven o’clock evening news on television ...”

“... of influence on the mathematical side. Queneau’s ‘Les Fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert’ treats Hilbert’s claim that instead of points, lines and planes you might just as easily say ‘tables, chairs and beermugs’ as an invitation to make a further move to ‘words, sentences and paragraphs’. Given that aspects of the Hilbert ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... in a family follows the departure of a particularly tiresome and exacting house guest. Elizabeth David herself – a veteran by marriage of wartime Cairo and pre-Independence Delhi – advised her readers thirty years ago: ‘Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most ...”

“... and Mann thought they were doing, but it is what the manner of their directing solemnly suggests. David Fincher’s Seven is rather different, since it has a clever plot and enough violent action for a whole series of movies, and certainly isn’t an essay. But it doesn’t see itself as just gory entertainment either, and it, too, is keen on the big ...”

“... reproach. Progressive rabbis may not be allowed to disturb the even tenor of their lives. In 1988, David Forman, a Reform rabbi, founded Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which has been an advocate for the rights of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, though its effectiveness is limited. At the beginning of October, it helped to rebuild homes in ...”

“... the homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition. The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975 – conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now ...”