“... millions of Shia pilgrims taking part in the Arbaeen walk were carrying the Iraqi national red, white and black tricolour as well as their traditional green, black, red and white religious flags. Shia religious identity is becoming more closely connected with Iraqi national identity. Once, nationalism was the province of ...”

“... Saddam’s survival nor al-Zarqawi’s death had much impact on the course of events, but the White House remained convinced that eliminating leaders and other high-value targets was a war-winning strategy. There is little evidence to support this theory; but still, the assassination of demonic opponents is clearly good politics, allowing American ...”

“... who are just beginning life can be seen to be much more grown-up. All the infirmities of age – white whine swilling, importunate bladders, evenings beginning after breakfast – thrust us firmly back into the needs and the atmosphere of being young together. And so Alun (at school it was plain Alan) Weaver and his wife Rhiannon come back to South Wales ...”

“... of The Greek Myths first appeared in 1955. For all his reputation as a hierophant of the White Goddess, holding court in his Majorcan retreat like some minor god in exile, Graves was strongly attracted to political and sociological readings of the myths. He brought to them the same taste for multi-layered interpretation that had earlier made him a ...”

“... as to constitute a serious health warning about the dangers of power and ambition. Dinner at the White House with the sinister Warren Hardings is neatly compared to an evening with the Macbeths, but a page or two later Harding dies of an apoplexy, so poetic justice is seen to be done. Hollywood is a well-made novel with much wit of the ‘little did they ...”

“... literary culture to cast a scornful perspective back at the wretched (and, of course, black-and-white) television set. But bang away at it as I might, I can’t get the thing more than fitfully tuned to the very different future that needs to be made from here: all I get is crackling static, promising whispers that keep dying away into over-poetic ...”

“... can recite the rosary of disused stations that used to be stops, and that now rewind in a blur of white lettering on blue enamel when we slice obliviously through them. Seeing Libramont take its place on a rail map that took in Sarajevo, Venice, Veliko Tarnovo, Cologne and Dubrovnik made me feel giddy, excited and not entirely comfortable. The world was a big ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”

“... nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the hero, a recluse and a ...”

“... T. Washington and to attend a black people’s congress in Chicago. He then offended some of his white hosts by calling for a mingling of the races and an end to segregation. More than thirty years later his commitment to removing social and racial inequalities was underlined by his membership of the Sankey Committee on Human Rights and by his 1940 Penguin ...”

“... is told in the form of an autobiographical memoir beginning in the White-chapel of eighty years ago. At the same time Amos incorrigibly treats modern history and literature as texts to be rewritten for his own devious purposes. Has he, or has he not, rubbed shoulders with the great? Apparently he has, from a very early age. He ...”

“... is always a simile or metaphor, never a straight prediction; and, for Atwood’s privileged white middle-class characters, it is a metaphor for fear. With The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood’s art can be seen, more clearly than before, to be based on the proposition that fear is good for you. Though the structure and setting of each novel are ...”

“... in the character of the pig-woman Ursula – in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ‘belly, womb, gaping mouth, udder . . . the celebrant of the open orifice’. It is a commonplace among critics that, since ‘Bartholomew Fair’ is almost the same thing or place as the theatre ...”

“... effects on American domestic politics. Ever since the overthrow of Saddam was first planned the White House has shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Bush went to war in Iraq in 2003 because, after overthrowing the Taliban so easily in Afghanistan, he thought he could win an easy victory there too, to his great ...”

“... wearing jeans or driving a large modern vehicle of the kind favoured by SDF officials, usually white in colour, is likely to be attacked. The safest way for non-locals to travel in this part of Syria is to wear traditional Arab dress and drive a beaten-up car in the company of local tribesmen. A farmer in Deir Ezzor, who gave his name as Abu Dahham, says ...”