“... to be spreading, no doubt being seen in high places as a sound qualification for anyone who may now be angling to land a job sorting things out in Iraq itself. The man who has been put in charge of a body called the Iraq Industry Working Group was quoted last week as saying that within quite a short time – as little as three years, he thought – Iraq ...”

“... between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness to a fine passion. Fort, who is a former fishing columnist at the Financial Times and the author of, among others, The Book of Eels, Against the Flow and The Far from Compleat Angler is a sort ...”

“... other kids (the ‘thick’ or ‘disruptive’ ones) and to attribute blame to them. Some kids may have made my life unpleasant, but they weren’t the problem. Fundamentally, we were on the same side. The problem was teachers, and more than the teachers, school itself.I didn’t know the name for it then, but I was a child liberationist. I objected to the ...”

“... local communities, and seems to regard local people who ‘stray’ into a park – which may well have been established on their ancestral land without their consent – as ‘enemies’ of conservation. New laws around poaching, as applied in ‘wilderness’ areas, ignore the already fraught relationship between local communities and law ...”

“... bushes of fine dust smoking on the skyline, and watchPlanes high in blue, dry air, then hear devil-may-care shouts, whistled dance tunes,Metallic clangs, bangs, long, long seconds of machine-gun sputter.Quit now of HQ’s bullshit,As tank commander my rank means my place is rightOf the dark-muzzled six-pounder, peering through the stark periscope:Very small ...”

“... have been whorled or studded with consummate finesse, they deflect our questions: ‘Their meaning may have been partly realised by their makers in the time and thought invested in their creation.’Alongside the acts of occupation went acts of orientation: that is the standard claim about the culture of the era – affirmed as much by that vertical band on ...”

“... sorcery from the island.’ The first evidence of sorcery was discovered by the chief in late May. He found a stone which he said belonged to men who wanted to ‘damage the community’. The same night, some children spotted a cat, which, encouraged by the adults, they identified as a shape-shifting sorcerer. A church elder arranged a prayer patrol to ...”

“... who heard it from a groom who heard it from a court servant) that Alfonso’s rebellious mother may be preparing to depart Ferrara for France in secret, taking his sisters with her. Later, in the castello, it’s Emilia again who informs her, reluctantly, of the extent of Alfonso’s power and his willingness to use it, in the shape of his violent reprisals ...”

“... and an appearance on Desert Island Discs. Only three minutes of the programme survive, which may be just as well. ‘The most important thing in my life,’ he told Roy Plomley, ‘has always been sport, you see: hunting, shooting and fishing. When that permits, we do a little farming. And when that permits, we do a little writing or ...”

“... east, and a shoreline exposed to Irish and Norse raiders to the south and west. Their inhabitants may even have welcomed Norse settlers – there are about forty Norse placenames along the coast, including Borgue, from the Old Norse borg, ‘fortress’ – as reinforcements against the British and protectors against the settlers’ own Viking cousins.The ...”

“... there are minor chapters in Burkina and Niger, Kemetism in the Sahel is found mostly in Mali; it may be that Nko, which shares with Kemetism a focus on African cultural emancipation, prepared the ground for this polytheistic, non-doctrinaire religion. Its followers are modest in number but ambitious. Last October, a video surfaced on WhatsApp and Facebook of ...”

“... practices does not play a prominent role in his account of how societies evolve. This stance may derive from the radical distinction drawn in the first volume of his Treatise between social explanation and the more interpretative sort of enquiry he terms description. However, at times one feels that his account of social stratification and change might ...”

“... virtually without framing or critique. The Queen will certainly need a glossary, but even then she may well be uncertain as to just how much Kelman likes his unlikely lad. This kind of thing has been said about Hamlet, to whom, as I say, Kelman alludes. At one point, ‘all he sought was death,’ and the next paragraph has him aching to be ‘out the road of ...”

“... shortage of plot and character in The Burden of Proof. There’s also no shortage of data – you may learn more about commodity dealing than you thought you wanted to know. Stern, compared with Sabich, is a trifle stodgy as a central character, though even that stodginess has its benefits: Turow does well with Stern’s first explorations of his newly single ...”

“... It would certainly be decorous to do so. But silences, as feminists and others have shown, may constitute the most significant meaning of a text. Jane Miller’s husband makes a brief appearance on the acknowledgments page of this book, but scarcely otherwise. Yet it is hard to imagine that Karl Miller’s presence played no part in the pilgrimage of ...”