“... be impressed by it. Less obvious, however, was the instability which finally brought it down on 1 May. The Conservative defeat was the result not of the ERM fiasco – that was merely the occasion – but of longer-term tensions within both the Party’s ideology and the country’s political system which in the end ground its hegemony to bits. When Mrs ...”

“... are not at all sure they approve of the legalistic and moralistic Islam that their sons or cousins may preach on their return. Many I met were more interested in the business skills that could be learned in Australia or elsewhere. I often heard the lament that their Arab grandfathers and fathers had not thought enough about education, and had simply pushed ...”

“... than just to check for it.’ ‘Well, they might not be looters.’ Now he looked surly. ‘They may be getting their own things back. I found my plough in a house near here.’ ‘So what’s the point of checking for looters?’ ‘Well, actually, we’re not just checking for looters, we’re looking for war criminals and collaborators.’ All that is ...”

“... mentions in a book about DJs (more than Paul Oakenfold, Todd Terry, Grooverider, Sasha and Derrick May put together). Possibly he hopes sceptical readers will be comforted by comparisons with a rock band. It’s like the prevailing wisdom about hip hop: ‘it’s the new rock’n’roll,’ people say, avoiding the more challenging idea that it’s actually ...”

“... of their reasons for tuning in that ‘so many other people listen to him and talk about it.’ It may be difficult to grasp now, but he provided the best – and most shocking – entertainment on air, mischievously telling his audience that all the nerve tonic adverts in the papers proved they were in a bad state, and that the British ‘Ministry of ...”

“... creolised race’, ‘speakers of a hideous taal patois’ and so forth. Outbursts of this kind may properly be compared with his half-mad imprecations against the Germans during the First World War. ‘The idea begins to dawn upon the German mind that this is not a war of victories but a war of extermination for their race … There can only be ...”

“... with light and day’), but it is impossible to judge what effect was intended. Dylan Thomas may have been happy to intone the poems at his reading (they are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s dismissive description of Graham as ‘an adolescent playing with the materials of great ...”

“... comic-pathetic idea of a man condemning himself while he thinks he is freeing himself. Don Quixote may be the grandest treatment of the comic illusion of freedom; Part One of Cervantes’s novel ends with Quixote beautifully defending the mission of knight-errancy: ‘I can say that ever since I became a knight-errant I have been ...”

“... distorts the final volume’s picture of the age. Though American motives in the Roosevelt years may not have been golden, it is hard to accept them, as Vidal seems to wish us to, as entirely brazen, powered exclusively by imperial ambition. It ought to be possible to say this while also deploring illusions, myths and ...”

“... from my groin and sellotaped it to the letter. “And these few pubic hairs, in the hope that they may make up for any inconvenience. Ever yours, Trudie Trumpeter.”’ When the Landaus complained about this, Rupert had his agent issue the following statement: ‘Rupert gets between five hundred and a thousand letters a week, and as you know some fans do ask ...”

“... the first black man to break a barrier, he did not try to carry others along with him. He may have disappointed himself, too, over the decades, as he continued to insist his second novel was nearly done. Rampersad provides exhaustive details of what is portrayed as a flaw in Ellison’s psychology: his compulsive institution-joining, entering the ...”

“... pressure, forced Israel to withdraw, leaving the majority of its local collaborators behind.On 25 May 2000, tens of thousands of Lebanese – Christians, Druze and Sunnis as well as Shia – poured into the south in a day of celebration, many returning to their villages for the first time since the occupation began. Israel had never before abandoned occupied ...”

“... prescription is clarity. Language records our predicament, but is also the means by which we may worsen or remedy it. He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it ...”

“... New features could be introduced without any sense of anachronism, rather as a new picture may be hung in an old house. ‘Britain’ itself was still a semi-mythic construct, supposedly the creation of the Trojan ‘Brut’, descendant of Aeneas, and Brindle keeps the particularities of Scotland and Ireland in view. Scotland, though it would have its ...”

“... liked turn-ups on trousers, and I was the best-dressed boy in boarding school (not the bonus it may sound like when you want to fit in). The French for ‘turn-up’ is revers – reversal, or inside-out. So many variations of doubleness and overlapping, inner and outer, spoken and unspoken, borders and their crossings, reversals and inversions. I now take ...”