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“... observers of the Israeli political scene who share a special interest in Israeli-Arab relations. Ian Black is the Guardian correspondent in Jerusalem and the author of Zionism and the Arabs. Benny Morris worked for the Jerusalem Post before it lurched to the right and is the author of the highly-acclaimed The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee ...”

“... readers were not deluded). The abolitionists, McQuirk declared, had made of the West Indies ‘a black Ireland’ – with a population which was ‘free’ in name but degraded and destitute in condition. Not that the negroes, any more than the Irish, resented their degradation, so long as they had vegetables (potatoes or pumpkins) to keep the walls of ...”

“... purple Than they were this time last year; The caverns of ‘your bridge’ Less brilliantly jet black than I remember them. Even from up here, though, I can tell It’s the same unfathomable prayer: If you were to look up now would you see Your moon-man swimming through the moonlit air? Colours Yes, I suppose you taught us something. That ...”

“... not a scent Exactly, but on hot days or at night I do remember it As slightly burnt, or over-ripe: Black wheatfields, sulphur, skin. It’s noiseless too Although from time to time I think I’ve heard it Murmuring: a prayer Presumably, a promise or a plea. And no, It’s not at all substantial; that’s to say It’s substanceless, it’s not a thing That you ...”

“... understandable given the current funeral atmosphere in England, but the psychic ramifications of Black Dogs are global in reach, and people we know are calling with questions. This is the reason the London Review has made contact, and why I’m sitting in a seedy hotel room in Uzbekistan writing about Black Dogs, instead ...”

“... struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid’. Ian Gilmour reviewed the book in the ‘LRB’ of 10 December 1998. What he says seems apposite.The​ first political misjudgment was an almost universal overestimate of Britain’s postwar power and status. Nearly all the politicians and leading civil servants ...”

“... The photograph of the author on the jacket is warning enough. He is dressed all in black, poised as though ready to pounce; his eyes fix you through a cloud of smoke. The cigarette, which is positively belching fumes, is held at the precise angle guaranteed to cause the most severe nicotine staining of the fingers ...”

“... In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the title ...”

“... freeze froze even deeper. ‘But, but’ – and this with genuinely aghast reproach – ‘but, Ian, really, why? This little scene, or something very like it, was played out on at least three other occasions during my short visit. For me, the ‘why’ was clear enough. I knew Podhoretz somewhat, he was the editor of a literary/intellectual magazine ...”

“... short story is a form she ought to be restrained from dabbling in. Too many of the pieces in The Black House read like jottings for possible Patricia Highsmith novels: the childless professional couple who take in two geriatrics from the local Old Folks Home and find their lives gradually ‘taken over’; the group of bored New York socialites who resent ...”

“... goalkeeper learned his trade from the great German, Sepp Meier, and that is why he wears those black track-suit trousers. Meier gave them to him.’ Expert (chuckling): ‘I didn’t realise he was wearing track-suit trousers.’ The jester here was Ian St John, who from the very start has worn the air of a man who has ...”

“... sequence to watch them drive stout posts         bleak to look at into the dark ground the black lightless fen all about the aims of the whole bound in like a literary theory         snarled in rough cuts to earn a living to repudiate The hoover fades beneath a lethal march off this page         to another partiality from the air ...”

“... medical or clerical in its thoroughness, as if, rather than writing, Barnes was dispensing, from a black bag, or ministering from a sick-call set, prescribing lozenges or offering wafers. There is, for example, his anxious habit of indicating his theme in his opening sentences. Turning to page one of Talking It Over and reading that ‘My name is Stuart, and I ...”

“... a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly.’ McEwan has always been ...”

“... rejoicing at the death of his predecessor’. Even Day Lewis’s admiring editor and close friend, Ian Parsons, when he was putting together a Collected Poems, shrank from reprinting the poet’s Laureate offerings. He called these works ‘banal when they were not embarrassingly disingenuous’. And this, over the centuries, has been the way of things with ...”