“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we were the victims of the accident, though it didn’t feel like that. The two women, one of whom may have been the girl’s mother, had successfully put themselves forward as victims and got the lion’s share of the money. The money I had given to the real victim, the little girl, was doubtless confiscated by an adult. Throughout the whole drama she never ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Map Five. The map of Israel’s ‘Final status’ proposals for the West Bank put forward in May 2000 are shown in Map Six. All maps were provided by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Washington.]On 29 September, the day after Ariel Sharon, guarded by about a thousand Israeli police and soldiers strode into Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (the ‘Noble ...”

“... 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 Castro, not all of them literary, will be known in full only after his demise, whenever that may be. Then people not only in England but everywhere, those of the Right as well as those of the Left, will know the true nature of the regime led by a man of infinite cunning and deceit, a beastly power-hungry egomaniac who is the bearded white double of ...”

“... mothers are an essential item of equipment in any psyche, and that though relations with mothers may be difficult or even dreadful, attachment to them is mandatory. They also know, as a corollary, that a denial of attachment is a failure to confront the reality of mother-attachment.‘You must find it very disturbing.’‘No, I find it ...”

“... hectares and 127,000 smallholders received 4.23 million hectares. What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed. Recently there have been signs that scholarly opinion is shifting. A study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies – in collaboration with the Programme for Land ...”

“... inspector investigating a murder that has not yet taken place: he ends up killing the suspect, who may be his father. The critic Jean Cayrol read Les Gommes as an allegory about the German occupation and the French Resistance: ‘sadly,’ Robbe-Grillet later wrote, ‘I had been on the other side.’ Les Gommes won the Prix Fénéon and the admiration of ...”

“... motives, no knowledge of the terrain or language and no regard for civilian life? One reason may be that the government was worried about the potential number of casualties. But casualties were inevitable: by the end of the war, five hundred Syrian mercenaries had been killed compared to nearly three thousand Azerbaijanis. Was the damage inflicted on ...”

“... he answered, ‘there is an office, a place in the city centre, where the destitute may queue for their Social Security. You might queue all day. And the next day. And the next day. And so on. After you have waited there ten hours, the clerk will close the window in your face and tell you to come back the day after tomorrow. He wants to go for ...”

“... mind our journeys were filled with endings, along with the perhaps concluding notion that nature may be larger than memory. The hills of the Scottish Borders seemed to say so, as did the trees around Abergavenny and the stones of the Aran Islands.It was about seven in the morning when we set out. Karl opened his door in Chelsea and I stepped inside the house ...”

“... from the boys at home without paying anything back; Plorn refused to return £800 to Henry. He may have reasoned that the money was a fraction of what had been spent on Henry’s education, in which case he had probably got his sums right. If we summarise the central plot of the avowedly autobiographical David Copperfield with attention to the patterns of ...”

“... about Knox constantly – about her poor hygiene, her promiscuity and her general weirdness. This may not add up to a solid case for the prosecution, but it adds up to something. Yet journalists have been as uninhibited in proclaiming Knox’s innocence as they were in condemning her. The American novelist Nathaniel Rich wrote a long piece for Rolling Stone ...”