“... a means of communication between strangers. The traveller who gives his character to these novels may have come from the Eastern United States – as do Theroux himself and several of his narrators – but that isn’t important. This traveller brings next to nothing with him – none of the conventional assumptions or idiosyncrasies of the older generation ...”

“... over the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, making the point that whatever the final verdict may be on the question of forgery, it is well to remember that no great Scottish writer has failed to display questionable, if not criminal, characteristics in regard to his personal character or in connection with his work, and that, even if the charges against ...”

“... a firetrap in which everyone casually smokes. Julia’s TV career is in danger – her character may be killed off, a crime within a fiction within a crime fiction. Someone nearly drowns, and then someone else nearly drowns. Brodie sees a young hitchhiker with a unicorn backpack, and later finds a similar backpack washed up on the beach. ‘Jackson didn’t ...”

“... demands of the uprising that forced Mubarak from power in February 2011. The law expired in May 2012 and although the military regime revived it briefly after the Rabaa massacre, it could not be reinstated permanently because it remained such a powerful symbol of the Mubarak era. Instead the regime devised a new Protest Law, which came into effect on 25 ...”

“... at will. Discussion and electivity were characteristic of the Party’s internal procedures. It may be that what inhibits Pipes from recording this is a feeling that by doing so he would somehow be making the Bolsheviks into democrats. This is not a necessary conclusion. The Bolsheviks had constantly paraded their lack of commitment to following democratic ...”

“... Afterwards it’s either a cheery wave and back to the motor or a small gin and tonic if I think I may have been recognised. Whatever else I do in the morning I must inspect the Burrell Collection. Brand-new and some miles away in a park. ‘Get as near as possible,’ I told the taxi driver: ‘I always fall down in snow.’ We parked on concrete and ...”

“... of death. Because they are recognisably his themes, one is somehow reassured by them – which may be false comfort, for it’s not the same as understanding them. Here is a lone, elderly woman, soon to die but surviving for the time being in a cabin or hovel in a patch of stones. Sometimes she visits a nearby tomb, and comes under the scrutiny of 12 ...”

“... were fighting and dying deep inside Iraq in an effort to stop the Scuds being fired at Israel – may not be far from the truth. The facts about the human results of the war are still denied us by the generals, even if the sufferings of a few selected groups of men and women are revealed. Thus the brutality meted out to the Kuwaitis by Iraqi occupation forces ...”

“... thinking, reality is seen as a complex system of correspondences in which given components may throw light on their counterparts or actually symbolise them. Leviticus, then, in Douglas’s view, is not in its deepest concerns a series of regulations for butchering sacrificial animals, purifying contaminated persons and substances, and keeping unfit ...”

“... distance of the meat-packing plant in Saskatoon. Unfortunately or fortunately as the case may be, most of her pieces are set in Montreal, which is as foreign to me as Reykjavik or Ulan Bator, Canada being several countries stitched together in the same flag. She begins, however, in a way that is familiar: ‘That year, it began to rain on the 24th of ...”

“... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long ...”

“... enshrined in the mausoleum outside Tehran which has just been destroyed. Mohammed Reza Shah, too, may find himself embalmed in Egypt: but he will certainly have to wait for enshrinement in his native Iran. The former monarch’s main preoccupation now is to mull over how it all went wrong, as though the scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could somehow be ...”

“... given by the Palmerstons. Everyone knew whom Disraeli meant when he said in a public speech in May 1858: ‘Leading organs of the press are now place hunters of the Cabal, and the once stern guardians of popular rights simper in the enervating atmosphere of gilded saloons.’ But Disraeli never believed in permanent enmities – nor, for that matter, in ...”

“... or perhaps a poet’s metaphor, but in any case have been found contrived and trivialising. There may be more to say for the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these ...”

“... midst of oil booms. Maass can’t be held responsible for all the wrongheaded thinking his book may encourage, but he might at least have considered the difference between correlation and causation. There are factual mistakes, too, in Maass’s account, specifically in his discussion of Saudi Arabia, the area I know best. Osama bin Laden’s ...”