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“... the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), as told by Michael Scharf, a one-time US appointee at the UN and a Tribunal insider, is full of unexpected and telling ironies. Not the least of these concerns the involvement of the US Administration, which had previously been so worried about the possibility of having to ...”

“... Nike Town, with its spiralling floors of merchandise rising around an atrium (dominated by a 200-foot video screen that beams out adverts), is not a store built to make money – it doesn’t pack enough luxury items per square foot. Instead, as the practitioners of entertainment architecture like to say, it exists to tell ...”

“... then of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, himself once the tallest schoolboy in Britain at six foot seven, he must, to his son, have seemed like Oceanus or something; an altogether more convincing mastery of the world than most fathers. Sending his son (both sons) to Eton was a bridge to home, a social leap, but also, the son feels, a kind of betrayal, as ...”

“... he even mentions the intifada. Indicating a grieving woman in the picture, helpless at the foot of the central cross, the voice says, ‘Bearing in mind ... the considerable influence of this iconography exercised by one means or another, only some unlikely inhabitant from another planet, where no such drama has ever been enacted, could fail to ...”

“... or that the genre may be superseded. That paragraph of summary might be lengthened by a foot or so without providing much further illumination for the prospective reader. The novel is far too long, complex and bizarre for even a preliminary synopsis to be feasible. But perhaps two further observations should be made. Letters incorporates, among ...”

“... by state prisoners on work-relief furloughs), the hogs deposit their waste in ‘25-foot-deep lagoons of ordure that sicken the people living round about, poison the water-table and import high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus into such rivers as the Neuse, the Tar-Pimlico and the Albermarle’. Senator Faircloth chairs the Senate Subcommittee ...”

“... world have been different? Leaving aside the probability that, even if Patton had not put his foot in it in Sicily, he would sooner or later have done so somewhere else – as he did several times, and several times again had to apologise – a number of interesting possibilities arise. One is that he might have been in command at Anzio instead of the ...”

“... waste their few missiles on Vancouver or Toronto. Canadian taxpayers, meanwhile, would be asked to foot a substantial portion of the bill for missile defence – although the bulk of the jobs and profits would go to the United States. Yet the Canadian Government appears poised to offer its full co-operation. Although the Defence Minister, Art Eggleton, insists ...”

“... when seen ‘clad in a dirty old flannel dressing-gown [and] covered in jewels from head to foot’. But she is also monstrous; ‘a big spider in the middle of her web’, she hangs menacingly over the plot, terrifying her son and frustrating both Anne and Alexa. She doesn’t love her son. She has an antique dealer’s heart with space for only one ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... women, and the comical Sciapods (‘shadow-feet’), contorting themselves to hold a single huge foot up in the air to act as a parasol. In some illustrations, Alexander is carried into the sky by huge birds, to survey the earth from above; in others, he descends in an ingenious submarine vessel to explore the ocean floor. Accompanying him on this ...”

“... days: in doing so, they also throw a good deal of unintentional light on the reasons for its fall. Michael Stewart and Douglas Jay were both awarded Firsts at Oxford in the Twenties, entered Labour politics in the Thirties, held junior office in the Attlee Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to ...”

“... their heads and complained of the ‘bad Bengali’ – ‘the language does not taste well.’ Michael Datta (Madhusudan Datta, 1824-73), who took the name ‘Michael’ on his conversion to Christianity, was highly regarded as an innovator in Bengali blank verse and for his elevated Miltonic style. But he was never a ...”

“... late cold spell brought frost, and frost was the bane of labourers who had to break through the foot or so of frozen ground to excavate the foundation and prevent frost heave before sinking elm piles and filling the shallow trenches with limestone and pebbles for drainage. It was also the enemy of the bricklayers who then took over, constructing out of ...”

“... A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes a good excuse to look back at the spiky virtues of ...”