“... is over? I am wondering not just how he is, but where. I begin to suspect he has gone so far he may never come back. When I phone the unit that claims to expect him, they can tell me nothing. Must be still in theatre, they say; but it’s clear they don’t care, it isn’t their responsibility. Have they just mislaid him? That seems possible. They take my ...”

“... might appear. If it cannot be allowed simply to drop out of the picture, it is partly because we may find ourselves throwing out personal identity along with it. The self, after all, is an obvious candidate to be the phantasmal thing that remains consistent through the variable accidents of our experience, providing them with a medium in which they can ...”

“... longer invest so much in mere association – it has at least been put in its place. John McCain may be launching ugly spots with increasingly crude and mendacious claims about his opponent; Barack Obama’s media teams will certainly spotlight their man’s high cheekbones and trim good looks, even when he’s talking up his tax plans. But cheerful ...”

“... on the desert air,’ Gray wrote, suggesting also that ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest’ – ‘here’ being the country churchyard of the poem’s title. The idea is tempting, semi-consoling and ultimately incoherent. If this corpse, in life, was mute and inglorious he just wasn’t Milton. This is precisely Harrison’s ...”

“... pakeha too have been dealt a treacherous hand: ‘A New Zealander has some reason to know what it may be like to belong to a people which thought it had a history and is now instructed by others that it has none.’ In 1973, the United Kingdom acceded to the European Common Market, and – without much of a thank you for support in two world wars and much ...”

“... story: strong, inventive and dynamic. If you enlarge the frame to include South Asia, the picture may be less rosy but it is still largely positive. The African experience, of course, is far more mixed, as is the Arab world, but there is no reason to believe that imperial adventures are going to put that right. Indeed, some of the greatest difficulties these ...”

“... to GB84, with its scenes in triumphant Tory drawing-rooms and sense that the coalfields may as well be on Mars, also prefers to put Thatcher inside characters’ heads instead of on the page (except for one brief appearance). In both books, her power at its bullying peak is well conveyed. In GB84, at least at first, Scargill is not a much more ...”

“... Koven hopes that his revelation of the persistent entanglement of the erotic and the altruistic ‘may perhaps inspire and chasten those intent to better the world to reflect deeply on the implications of the choices made by like-minded men and women a century ago’, and no doubt that hope is sincere. But it is worth asking whether the approach deployed here ...”

“... seriousness makes her book even more puzzling, especially as a novel written by a woman. It may be that The Tattooed Girl says less about America than it does about the stranglehold of certain conventions and cultural standards on American fiction. The characters are removed from reality, the book itself less a novel than a clumsy melange of ...”

“... and despite the Union leadership’s attempt to calm the atmosphere, the press made much of it. It may have struck the administration that it was beginning to look like the weaker partner in this careful rapprochement with Islam; in any case, by the summer, with public thinking about the veil taking another ungenerous turn, Chirac moved to set up the ...”

“... wrote it. But do they actually do this? I suggest that they skip what is not worth reading, and it may be that they have cultivated the art of skipping to their profit; but most people haven’t: it is surely better that they should have their skipping done for them by someone of taste and discrimination. Here’s a paragraph Maugham struck from the first ...”

“... seven, eight. But introduce Stuart to readers as he is now, a fully-fledged gawd-help-us, and he may just grab their interest straight away. By the time they reach his childhood, it is a matter of genuine interest how he turned into the person that he is. So we’ll move backwards, in stages, tacking like a sailboat against the wind. Familiar time flow ...”

“... World War acquired a bad reputation, but not everything that was said was a lie. German soldiers may not have bayonetted babies in Belgium as the popular press had it, but they did commit atrocities. According to recent studies, German soldiers shot civilians in occupied Belgium and France, they raped women, and they deliberately destroyed cultural landmarks ...”

“... commercial and managerial resources required to build and fight a seagoing fleet’. This may be putting the cart before the horse or, to unmix metaphors, the land before the sea. Because of the sheer scale and variety of skills, commodities and manpower they required in order to function, 17th and 18th-century fighting navies – and not just ...”

“... of the future had the status of science and the power to secure social stability. Methodologists may bicker about the appropriate weight to be given to accommodation and prediction; this chemist and administrator sought to make his world predictable, then based his authority on that achievement. Here Gordin’s unprecedentedly careful analysis of ...”