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“... of – the NPT. In Leonard Wibberley’s novel The Mouse that Roared (1955), later made into a Peter Sellers film, a tiny impoverished country declares war on the United States in the hope of being rapidly defeated, occupied and reconstructed. The plan goes wrong when the flyweight belligerent inadvertently acquires the world’s most powerful weapon, and ...”

“... only be read at the National Library. He lived for a while in a ‘weekender’ (a cottage in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ship to Britain. By the time he was 21 he had worked as cook in a hamburger bar, helped lead a strike in the hat factory, and married. He wanted to get to Europe, but he was not a competent enough draughtsman to win a ...”

“... for the South Island. The weather was not blandly seasonal. It was rarely very cold – the native bush is evergreen – but the weeks of rain, cloud and wind were punctuated by days of bright, windless sunlight, the air cleared to such perfect transparency that the distant perspective was veiled in blue mist as in much European painting. At the end of the day ...”

“... it is never possible to leave no trace at all, and would both see why walkways are built in the bush and know that it was a sign that man’s mark on the world is invasive even when intentions are benign.So the experience is a shared one. But what to do with it? Less dedicated and professional walkers than Fulton are also obliged to leave laconic ...”

“... In his speech announcing the immediate exercise of the powers Congress had conferred on him, Bush oddly borrowed a phrase from Tom Paine and said: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ This line actually introduces Paine’s masterly pamphlet ‘The Crisis’, and goes on to talk scornfully of the ‘summer soldiers and sunshine ...”

“... diamond-dealers which took place when Flash Fred and the police concealed their car in ‘the bush ... untouched by man’ just outside ‘the protected area of Kimberley’. About that I have two observations to make. The first is that I spent almost twenty years of my life in Kimberley without ever hearing anybody refer to its ‘protected area’. The ...”

“... are legible only to those who can read the secretive earth’. This requires a tipping of the bush-hat to aboriginal culture, though the Murris have moved out for the duration of the story, apart from Ethel, who ‘sits there, cross-legged in the red dust at the edge of the bora rings, smiling to herself ... putting the scattered rocks back where they ...”

“... and embittered editorials, and eighty years after the Klaxon, a recent issue of the Burning Bush, a Galway journal, complained: ‘the Burning Bush has been a failure. Having set out to promote "underground” literature and "experimentalism” . . . it soon became apparent that the Revolution of the Word was not ...”

“... the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in Nicaragua. The elder Bush later renominated him and got him through. Gates would have struck George H.W. Bush as a sound appointment because he knew the secrets and could be trusted to keep them. When the younger ...”

“... data from polls conducted last November and December. Perhaps the Gulf War has changed things. The Bush-Major axis may not have the emotional intensity of the Reagan-Thatcher partnership, but one does get the impression that, for the moment at least, the Prime Minister finds it easier to talk to George Bush than to Helmut ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... Saudi Arabia, royal diplomat, gossip, host, March Hare, who pops up throughout his trilogy on the Bush administration’s wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and others, at his home, in his own kitchen, over supper. If you’re Nigella-ish, you’ll be disappointed by his ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... for the mind’s eye, or the movies (or, now that young women so regularly go off into the bush to live with gorillas or chimpanzees, the documentary film-maker), but not for an illustrator. Grimm is easier to illustrate than a Perrault or Hans Andersen: grotesques and giants keep their awfulness, comics their humour, long after princesses have started ...”

“... and when the drug wears off, depression.’ As a Washington-based reporter who covered the Bush Presidency until this August, I am constantly surprised by how supine the US press was in those days. Leaving aside the cover-up of his sexual activities, the Kennedy White House got away with issuing, virtually unchallenged, grossly misleading statements ...”