“... else about Vidal, are dear to Vidal’s heart’). These differences in length and manner may have something to do with the exiguous spaces in which English, as opposed to American, journalists have to operate: but there is also a difference of temperament, of which one might take a rough measure by comparing, say, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ with The ...”

“... what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out ...”

“... hatreds, alliances between siblings have framed economic and cultural life for centuries. But this may be changing. Used to exercising consumer choice in all circumstances, younger people are (we’re told) increasingly likely to spend time with their friends, rather than sticking to siblings. The supply of brothers and sisters has also shrunk. Contraception ...”

“... career to his family. Deep though his revulsion at having to hand over a man for possible torture may have been, it remained a private ...”

“... Bulgaria, Italy, Colombia, the United States, Britain and many other countries where local groups may be interested in buying or selling their products, or laundering their money. The Russians will have a presence there but are unlikely to be the dominant group in the territory. Organised crime is now a huge presence in the global economy. It is parasitic but ...”

“... hunt took the opportunity to stock up on game. The tourist office of the Lozère département may not be the first to try to profit from the beast. Smith mentions one wolf killing in order to demonstrate the hunter d’Enneval’s ‘contempt for the local inhabitants’. The dead wolf proved to contain fragments of cloth and bone. The bone had probably ...”

“... to find examples of such things as female networking. The word ‘gender’ does not appear. This may be no bad thing, but Castor’s readers would have had a better idea of the ‘individual experiences’ of the women she writes about if she had included a fuller discussion of the nature of medieval queenship. Central to that was the queen’s ...”

“... author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules’.3 That ‘potential’ may be the very condition of language becomes hard to ignore when you start thinking even a little about translation, a fact made vivid in Perec’s efforts at getting his friend Mathews’s work into French. After becoming hooked on Mathews’s first novel, The ...”

“... more than a figure of speech. Hamid’s decision to structure an angry book in such a gimmicky way may seem odd at first. Gimmicks are typically a tool of the kind of capitalism Hamid attacks, drawing attention to the surface while disguising the vacuum below. But it’s clear enough that we’re supposed to feel frustrated by the gimmick, or at least to feel ...”

“... or fidelity. There is everything to be said for going out on a limb, but the risk is that we may think we are further out than we are, and sometimes the strangest place will not be the furthest out but the furthest in. This is the case with the extraordinary story by Kenji Miyazawa. It works wonderfully well in all three versions I can read (by David ...”

“... textual and editorial matters. This is everything one could ask for in a scholarly edition. There may be room to question the inclusion of The True Levellers Standard Advanced or A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England as works written by Winstanley alone, but the editors’ informed reasoning must command respect. Their introduction ...”

“... these might sound like mere ‘chattering’. All of which is to say that the readers of the LRB may have some common sense after ...”

“... than they do with their countries’ middle classes. And while ‘l’exception française’ may still mean something to those in the middle, there is little sign of it in the world documented by Aubenas. Perhaps she has hit on the exception to the ...”

“... who never sets out to harm anyone and registers only confusion as misery flowers in his wake – may be one of Levy’s more topical exercises in perspective. The novel maps a self being pieced back together so that the weakest points show. It also addresses a moment in history that could feel like a bad dream or a bad joke, and Levy has always taken those ...”

“... via Muhandis via Soleimani). The US tends to euphemise the process in both cases, although this may be changing. In a paper published in 2019 by the US army, ‘In Pursuit of a General Theory of Proxy Warfare’, Major Amos Fox argued that the US doesn’t talk about its proxies in frank enough terms. ‘Phrases such as security force assistance, training ...”