“... of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein. Employing several narrators, including ventriloquised historical figures, it told of a criminal gang that set slaves free, only to capture them again for profit. Lowboy, set in present-day New York, describes the disturbing ...”

“... and had been since 1939, when he invented the pocket (as distinct from the strip) cartoon for the William Hickey column in the Daily Express. He drew more than ten thousand of them over the next forty years and his characters, especially Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, Mrs Frogmarch the Tory lady and Canon Fontwater, played out the range of topical ...”

“... to stand, or rather crouch. Dodson is splendid in appearance as well as oratory, a prophetic white beard underlining his main argument, that Australia should try and emulate Mandela’s South Africa by setting up commissions to work out reconciliation – and, by implication, to revise the historical understanding that has travestied such ...”

“... car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which Marinetti, declaring in 1909 that ‘time and space died yesterday’, describes driving his car so fast that it spins out and overturns. She ...”

“... and renewal in postwar Toronto. Such criticism represented everything that the briskly rationalist William Empson, who detested religiose aesthetics like those of Eliot, found most nauseating. It was enamoured of charts and diagrams, polarities and sub-divisions, with that odd combination of rigorous categories and occult contents which one associates with ...”

“... Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of assimilationist immigrants who ...”

“... al-Qaida. ‘We cannot reverse this outcome by more use of military force in Iraq,’ Lt General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘To try to do so would require siding with Sunni leaders and the Baathist insurgents against pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Baathist insurgents constitute ...”

“... approval when Michelle Obama presented the Best Picture award live from the Diplomatic Room of the White House. In Iran itself, however, the film was less well received. Despite an opening sequence that apologetically acknowledged CIA involvement in an earlier operation – the 1953 coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which many ...”

“... like the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”

“... The blue line can bluff.‘What [was] hee in his Mothers Womb,’ the 17th-century physician William Harvey wondered: ‘whether three bubbles? Or some rude and indigested lump?’ We have better answers to Harvey’s question now, but many others remain unanswered. Fertility doctors can sort and tidy sperm, for example – selecting for well-shaped ...”

“... view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she ...”

“... in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride to literary notoriety on Emily’s white apron strings. So the story goes – or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad ...”

“... narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza such as people have often made up by bringing together totally unrelated lines. It also ...”

“... and the House of Lords. The actual picture, Dr Alderman reveals, was much more complex: William Cobbett himself was fond of referring to the ‘blaspheming Jews’, Gladstone was a Whig and a great opponent of the Jews at one and the same time, while Disraeli was a Tory and the final Emancipation Act itself was a Conservative measure. How then, Dr ...”

“... German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not identify with the opposition in Bavaria, preferring to stress its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the ...”