“... 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 ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... favour of the ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’, elicited, 827 phone-calls to the White House and 7,268 protest telegrams. Statistics like these flesh out the clichés about the Zionist lobby wagging the dog of US foreign policy. At first glance, the rise of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ in the Middle East suggests that the thin veneer of ...”

“... defenceless civilians abroad and at home, but his ventures into armaments produced a litter of white elephants. His massive kok-saghyz plantations took valuable arable land out of food production without ever producing a viable source of ‘plant-based rubber’. The shale oil refineries and peat-based fuel extraction plants were a costly irrelevance. His ...”

“... bar’: by which, he explains, is meant the economically privileged position of the tiny white administrative class but, even more important, the strong sense of social exclusivity around that group. The black elites of British Africa were never offered the assimilationist possibilities that saw Senghor and Houphouet-Boigny rise to play executive ...”

“... minced pork, tied up with string and cooked in a thick stew of carrots, shallots and tomatoes in white wine,’ she recalls. ‘I looked at my plate with sullen disinterest [sic].’ The logical next step is a house-makeover novel set during the Blitz. Francis Cottam gestures towards this when the hero of The Fire Fighter takes against the look of the ...”

“... life, while taking an infusion of colour and variety from outside. Reproduced in black and white (more disadvantageous to this kind of painting than to any other), the paintings seem to have been bled of their vitality by some sort of vampiric borrowing of life. Even so they have a poignancy, indeed a saving inarticulacy, which the poems are likely to ...”

“... Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, John Cheever’s Selected Stories, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, William ...”

“... that exposed them in the end, not the parti-coloured Empire of contemptuous exploitation, but the white settler Empire to which they looked for support. Like the Northerners, the pioneers of New Zealand and South Africa had too much use for rugby in the formation of identity and the bonding of community to take it casually and they quickly developed it to the ...”

“... He looks down into a narwhal’s mouth, at ‘the accordion pleats of its tongue, at the soft white interior splashed with Tyrian purple’. That allusion to Carthage and its famous purple dye (derived from whelks) is typical of the classical marquetry which adorns his scientific observation. His evocation of a narwhal’s ‘sea-washed back’ echoes ...”

“... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...”

“... years (except in a few references to the Normans), but about four hundred. He credits Gilbert White, writing in the late 18th century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their well-furnish’d and ...”