“... progeny who survived the Holocaust in Poland? (The number of Jews remaining today in Poland, which may be as high as ten thousand, depends on how one counts those who were converted to Catholicism as children during the war or in other ways lost their Jewish identity and have now reclaimed it.) Yes, the reply might go, this is not a result of Polish ...”

“... with London, Liverpool, Hull, Southampton or nearby Coventry; it is one of the few places where it may be genuinely true that more of the built fabric was destroyed by ‘the planners’ than the Luftwaffe.The demiurge of Birmingham’s rebuilding wasn’t a planner at all, but the city’s chief engineer between 1935 and 1963, Herbert Manzoni. Distrustful of ...”

“... woman Brooke fell in love with was one who was going to remain out of reach for some time. In May 1908 he went to a Fabian supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the ...”

“... a dragger captain out of Stonington, Connecticut, confesses in one Mitchell piece that he may look serene but he’s dreading something. ‘What?’ a sceptical woman asks. ‘I don’t know,’ says Ellery. ‘I wish to God I did know.’ He was raised Baptist but gets along without it. ‘I used to go to church,’ he adds, ‘just to hear the good ...”

“... lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry ...”

“... reform programme got going, and speculates, plausibly in my view, that the North’s leaders may have been ‘lulled by the evidence of their successes’. In any case, within a very few years North Korea fell irrevocably behind. It happens that Martin and I were each given our first, closely chaperoned tour by the same person – Kim Jong-su. He ...”

“... His name was Starvation. It was two weeks until harvest and tradition decrees that not a root may be disturbed in the fields before the day of the new yam festival. The situation was serious. I released my pregnant goat to graze. Another week and the lazy thing should bear. As I feared, young idiots with empty pails were already loitering by my gate. They ...”

“... to Senior Persons carrying out their professional responsibilities in a reckless manner, which may carry a prison sentence.’ This, as it was probably intended to, translated into tabloidese as ‘Jail Bad Bankers.’ These proposals would, I suspect, concentrate the minds of senior bankers if they became law. But that is quite a big ‘if’. Human ...”

“... said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ Moustapha’s concerns were ...”

“... could they be sure that a bullet would not – counter-productively – actually kill him? A clue may lie in the embarrassed admission of Chen’s security detail that, supposedly because it was a hot day, he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, standard issue for a presidential incumbent on the campaign trail. An odd feature of the shooting was that aim was ...”

“... for less charged moments, as when a more conventional cursus is touched on: ‘My last term, May-June 1939, was pretty good. I edited Granta, was elected to the Apostles and got a starred First in the Tripos, which also gave me a Studentship at King’s.’ Just how misleading this suppression of a subjectivity must be can be seen from the curious ...”

“... are still echoing in Shatila – but telling stories or thinking aloud about the work of others may have helped to keep them at bay: in 1984 a book of short fiction and another volume of criticism appeared. Khoury meanwhile was also overseeing a world literature series in Arabic. Writers in translation included Soyinka, Achebe, Mishima, Breyten Breytenbach ...”

“... of the Faithful, in Yellow Wind: ‘Is the soul a modular mechanism in which specific "parts” may be disconnected . . . until the danger passes?’ ‘Some parts of the soul,’ he asserts as a matter of fact in Death as a Way of Life, ‘cannot be reclaimed.’ Tamar takes up the question again. If a person seals up his soul for a certain mission, can ...”

“... We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out ...”

“... for believers, who can identify with the ‘terrifying joy’ it communicates. That may be true. But for the rest of us, Messiaen is not so much a messenger of the Word as a man whose faith led him to the furthest reaches of sound. And it is precisely the ‘bewildering’, violent, ecstatic nature of his music – the freedom of imagination he ...”