“... off the train we hardly recognised him: he seemed altogether smaller and more frail, though this may have been the effect of his being dressed in a new-looking suit and tie and carrying a new suitcase. He looked rather like a respectable bank clerk from Surbiton, and for a time talked like one, apparently doing his best to mask his Welsh intonation. We ...”

“... the focus to what didn’t or couldn’t happen. Access to the mysteries of composition in a novel may strike the reader as a bold experiment in form or just a steal from Milan Kundera’s notebook: either way, it stalls the rhythm of this book. You get a layout of scaffolding, the foundations, the architect’s designs, but you don’t take away any ...”

“... coupling of a general syllabus malaise with the rigour of its Medieval component – may be related. As Wormald says at the head of the first chapter: ‘The country in which this book was conceived, and the literary language in which it was written, are both more than a thousand years old.’ None of this has halted the British tendency to sell ...”

“... Leave Coincided with Kit Inspection’, enclosing it with a note to the Bombardier, hoping it ‘may bring fruit in due season’. ‘I think there must be something wrong with Bob Robertson,’ he reflects anxiously. ‘Yesterday evening I discovered that he keeps photographs of upwards of twenty women in his bedroom, none of the women having the slightest ...”

“... and cumulatively surreal details about the life of a character who, after a couple of pages, may be immediately sucked back into obscurity. ‘What’s going on out there,’ somebody in A Hall of Mirrors says, ‘is there are like a few billion people walking around and every one of them has a head with a lot of stuff going on in it.’ ‘I want to ...”

“... or writing seem mystical or magical. They are, of course, in a way. But they’re also not. Long may confusion reign. Things are difficult; why shouldn’t they be? The nice man nods. It seems we aren’t having a disagreement.Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These are the days. Don’t speak to anyone (except the vet on Darwin’s ...”

“... certainly nothing worthy (thank God, some will say) of being called an ideology. We believe (which may be too strong a word) that society, made up of individuals, isn’t wholly ‘godless’, albeit we would be hard-pressed to name any working god or list that god’s attributes. Maybe we are not as simple-minded as the ideologies we have given birth to, the ...”

“... Even readers who find the sentimentality of Murillo’s images of street arabs difficult to accept may be convinced by Brown’s account of the merits of, say, the moving yet dignified Return of the Prodigal Son, originally painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that ...”

“... been that first impressions deceive, that beneath the angular features and the schoolmarm manner may, perhaps, lie a less mannish sweetness, denied to the camera in scene after scene. So bony is her prose style that the same tantalising process is visited on the reader, and as on screen, alternating the terse and the yielding, she seduces us. Over the erotic ...”

“... would be for the Church, or the Church for the state. However, parts of the Field Day Anthology may simply assume that Catholicism is so natural as to require no special position, whereas Protestant orators, raving into a theological vacuum, are obvious exotics.If Protestantism looms larger than Catholicism, Nationalism looms larger than Unionism. The ...”

“... a challenge shared by both historians and anthropologists. Even if Clendinnen’s interpretation may not command universal assent, it will certainly enjoy a wide readership and elicit vigorous debate. It sent me scurrying back to Sahagun, Bernal Diaz, and other 16th-century chronicles which offer such a profusion of data on so many aspects of Mexica history ...”

“... Democrats should in turn have sought for a way to torpedo his personal reputation. Thomas may well turn out to be an able as well as a worthy man, and a good Supreme Court judge. But the manner of his appointment made it virtually impossible for him to seem anything other than George Bush’s token black, a beneficiary yet again of affirmative ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He was described by one mistress as greeting the climax with a great hoot of laughter. That may be the key to him: a lover laughing out loud, a financier vastly preferring journalism, a Canadian Presbyterian with a sense of humour – all terrifying ...”

“... 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 ...”