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“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”

“... people into her fiction more naturally than Monimbo manages with, for instance, Castro and Norman Mailer. Her good American English is laced with wisecracks, sad-funny like Woody Allen’s, clever-naive like Salinger’s. The English dialogue of Monimbo is very poor, by comparison. At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a ...”

“... his calculation presumably being that the requirement of loyalty to the leader would allow only a Norman Lamont kamikaze candidacy and that Heseltine and Michael Portillo, the real contenders, would fail to put up and then have to shut up. The result was a political chain reaction. John Redwood saw the opportunity presented by Portillo’s failure to stand ...”

“... All were born within a few years of each other. All are suitably telegenic. All are male and white and Oxbridge. If all three formed a coalition together, one would not at present be too surprised. Where are the new sorts of political actor? Where, crucially, are the really new political ideas? Linda Colley For the first time in my voting life, I ...”

“... of the charred and twisted bodies of women and children shocked a world which, thanks to Norman Schwarzkopf and CNN, had seen little of the horrors of the Gulf War. Pentagon officials, who claimed to have intelligence indicating the bunker was a command and control centre, denied knowledge of the civilian presence. Had they known, the attack would ...”

“... and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The White Negro’ (1956): there is the same priapism, the same shameless display, the same gusto and verve, the same excruciating hipsterism, as ...”

“... the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman Mailer’s phrase, ‘advertisements for myself’. In Zagajewski, the charm is that of all the world. O’Hara, straightening his eyelids, throwing a couple of tangerines in an overnight bag, is personally and actively and often spectacularly ...”

“... birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small’, and in 1979 the biologist Norman Myers published a little-read book called The Sinking Ark, showing with statistics that Bertram had been correct. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that large numbers of biologists began to take such concerns seriously. In 1991, the palaeobiologist David ...”

“... 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a friendless arriviste in London in 1908, he self-published a pamphlet at Christmas cannily called A Quinzaine for This Yule and then used the fact that it had sold out to convince Elkin Mathews to republish it under ...”

“... sort’, but ‘with much to contend with: among other things a terrific wife with a large head of white hair and tortoiseshell spectacles, who appears to be the worst scandalmonger in the county’. James regularly visited Herefordshire to stay with Gwendolen McBryde, an eccentric widow who ran a stud farm. She had married a close friend from his ...”

“... claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to ...”

“... Worldwide, CFC production should be phased out by 2010. With a journalist’s disenchantment, Norman Moss reports in Managing the Planet that bootleg CFC is still being made in Russia and China and smuggled into wealthier countries, but, since CFC is bulky and cannot be sniffed with any pleasure, the trade is gradually dying out. The hole in the ozone ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan ...”

“... one general, one on the taxing powers of the Scottish Parliament – would be held following a White Paper, but before a Bill was introduced into the Commons. This was a bold move, much criticised in Scotland. It implied some alarm about the prospects of a Bill, and the referendums were probably intended as much as a curb on MPs in a Commons with a small ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”