“... this alignment between deconstruction and a radical critique of existing political discourse. Michael Ryan has an essay on the inbuilt contradictions of liberal reason, arguing that we need a different epistemology – an alternative idea of language, politics and truth – in order to grasp and transcend these antinomies. The trouble with this ...”

“... authorities than the force commander in Mogadishu – they came from Centcom HQ in Florida and the White House itself. The charge sheet for any inquiry into Mogadishu war crimes might contain the names of some very high-ranking American individuals. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is roundly in favour of an International Criminal Court. But ...”

“... heads and demanded that we renounce Christ. When we got home from school, our flickering black and white televisions escalated the Communophobic barrage. The FBI Story, a weekly drama, competed in unmasking disloyalty with the real House Un-American Activities Committee and its Senate equivalent under Joe McCarthy. Commies, loners and eggheads were undermining ...”

“... of looks and talent: as though she’d decided to abandon the American dream and reverted to being white trash.In the mid-2000s the celebrity gossip machine was hitting peak efficiency, with a clutch of new weekly magazines followed by digital arrivistes such as TMZ, a rolling news website fed by a network of LA tipsters, and bloggers like Perez Hilton, a ...”

“... as it happens – and face down apartheid (Carter was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-racist). In the White House, with the new national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, at his shoulder, he set all this aside. His administration was as hostile to the MPLA as Ford’s had been. Shunned by the new figure in the White House ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... form. Opposite views of the problem are taken in two contributions, but with arguments in neither. Michael Daniel and Dmitry Ganenkov review the wealth of cases in the languages of Daghestan; Peter Arkadiev considers languages with just two cases, after which other contributors focus attention on particular languages or language groups, including Ik (Christa ...”

“... appears at the start of the novel’s second chapter: Detective Ali Lateef – born Rufus Lamarck White – enjoyed anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers, and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra. When casework was slow he amused himself by inventing simple alphabets, usually of the phonogrammic type, and using them to post ...”

“... It’s hard to know how seriously Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth ...”

“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... designed by Mies van der Rohe, curtains by Ben Nicholson, sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, a white skin sofa. A temporarily unirascible Geoffrey Grigson found their home ‘a place of parties, of extraordinary entertainment’, where one might meet Braque or Helion, the Nicholsons and the Moores, some of the artistic refugees from Hitler’s ...”

“... and reducing her, at least temporarily, to a meekly spousal role. Graves, for whom Riding was the White Goddess – ‘she was his muse and he loved her and abandoned himself to her,’ as one of the other disciples touchingly remarked towards the end – would have been horrified by such an outcome. But perhaps she secretly hankered for such a ...”

“... strike); in politics (Washington, LA and New York varieties); in gossip (on Nancy Reagan, whose White House nicknames included ‘Evita’ and ‘The Hairdo with Anxiety’, and whose edgy cluelessness is fixed for all time by a single detail: ‘At a state dinner for José Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador, she seated herself between President Duarte and ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... Books’, ‘Stories 1900-1939’ and so on – splendidly produced, with colour and black-and-white illustrations, and giving a good indication of what’s been available at various moments during this interesting period. We have only to glance at the catalogue to see how the Edwardian idea of manliness was purveyed for adolescent boys (‘A Lad of ...”