“... BRRRR. The Somalis have a fatalistic attitude towards bullets and shells. They say: “to whom it may concern.” ’ There are three notable recipients of bullets in Mogadishu: the flat man, the sack man and the rock man. By a fluke of climate and road camber, the features of the often run-over flat man have been preserved in the buttery tar-macadam of a ...”

“... so. Rabinovich declines to identify those who decided not to take the road towards peace. He may be intrigued by Frost’s suggestion that the choice when reaching the fork in the road ‘makes all the difference’, but all he will finally say is that ‘the choices of 1948-9 were made by Arabs, Israelis, Americans and others. And credit and ...”

“... to deal drugs. He claims to make £300 a day from this; I doubt if Sunny, tough though he may be, is tough enough to bring in that kind of money. He is already scared of boys who live in Ebony House, a special unit for young offenders, also in South London, and would have no chance fending them off if they got to hear of his £300 gold-mine. Sunny ...”

“... or Thailand into the compass of student travellers. Paradoxically the plane’s very size may well have helped to conquer many people’s fear of flying by allowing them to cross the world in a flying building rather than a dubious jet-propelled cylinder. In any case, shifting twice as many passengers as any air craft that preceded it, and as fast as ...”

“... terror. She is afraid of drugs and afraid that all the drinks she’s offered, even a cup of tea, may be spiked. ‘She thought, I’ll know in 20 minutes ... if by twenty to eleven her mind hadn’t caved in and splintered like a sheet of glass, she’d know she was going to be all right.’ She is worried that her mother will turn up late, as indeed she ...”

“... misunderstanding and untranslatability, reveals that money alone is translatable. Davidson may be suffocated by her ignorance of local language, customs and gestures, but, like many other tourists, she never confuses the value of fifty rupees in India with, for instance, that of a pound in Britain. Another point comes to mind reading of her travails ...”

“... empty’ by his green gaze. Multilingual, he is the product of a famous university; and one may be sure that, unlike Professor Moriarty, he did not fritter away his 21st year writing a ‘Treatise on the Binomial Theorem’. His aim is not just to redress the long-standing wrongs of China; as an agent of that ancient and secret society, the Si Fan, he ...”

“... the refusal to let his pots wobble, always counted against De Morgan with the craft purists. May Morris thought it his only fault. Bernard Leach – himself much less technically skilled – was dismissive. De Morgan’s achievement was the balance in his work between the conflicting elements in the Arts and Crafts ethos, in which individuals attempted ...”

“... the infallible bisection of his hair. As soon as the trial got under way at the Old Bailey in May 1918, Billing attracted the support of the Christian Scientists, who believed him to be ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril’. Concerned that he would not be able to continue his work if imprisoned, ‘a ...”

“... hall-of-mirrors effect. But then Auster could never make a case for himself as a stylist, and it may be that film, after poetry, criticism, non-fiction and novels, is his ideal home. His business, after all, has always been more the reinvention of form than the resuscitation of language. ‘Squeeze Play’, for example, inverts the standard whodunnit, being ...”

“... was impossible simply to replace the broken part with another, identical, one. The modern reader may wonder why Jefferson sought out the gunsmith. In school, we are taught that modernity was brought about by revolutions of two kinds: political (as in America and France) and industrial. If the connections between the two are discussed at all, it is only at ...”

“... Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches.’ When Ralph thinks he may be just an ‘instrument’, he is right in more ways than one. It’s this that should make questionable Fourth Estate’s rather opportunistic claim that Derek Beavan ‘tackles the issue of recovered memory’. In a way of course Ralph does sound like one ...”

“... record beyond recovery. Neville-Sington stuffs the gaps with speculation (‘must have’, ‘may have’ and ‘probably’ feature too often) and with appropriate, and often voluminous, quotation from Trollopian fiction (Fanny’s, Anthony’s and Thomas’s). It’s clearly a faute de mieux, but it works well as such. She has given us a Fanny for our ...”

“... What’s interesting about ‘red is warmer than green’ is something quite different; viz that (may be) it can be true for me but false for you; or (maybe) there’s no matter of fact at all about whether it’s true. There’s certainly a matter of fact about whether it’s raining; so what on earth does whether a representation is indexical have to do ...”

“... the individual, about freedom and dignity, about the human being as subject and the fact that one may not turn him into an object.’ ‘Not even if he himself would be happy about it later?’ Michael asks. ‘We’re not talking about happiness, we’re talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy, you knew the difference. It was no comfort to ...”