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“... Just as today Turks, Kurds and Armenians glower at one another across mountains in which foreign powers meddle at their own risk, so for centuries had Rome and Persia (and earlier Parthia) wrangled over this uncompromising terrain. Left in the hands of more or less pliable client kings, Armenia prevented either side easy access to the other’s ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... in Whitehall. The Chiefs were able to limit the damage by ensuring that Mountbatten’s own powers were not significantly increased, and his successors were careful to remain strictly within their briefs, but a new and yet more dangerous adversary now loomed: the Centre.Even during the period of his greatest weakness, the minister had had a central ...”

“... aimed at the rapid overthrow of the enemy armies in the field. The task was beyond their powers, and in 1915 all had to consider again, from first principles, how the war could be won. There were those – Haig in England, Ludendorff in Germany – who continued to believe that, given sufficient forces, they might still win the war with a single ...”

“... father, her daytime sleeps in the covered bathtub, her helpless affection for him, her strange powers, her endless need to steal what sustains the life of others. Letting the right one in might be the opposite of finding the right name for the ...”

“... and we have forgotten the actual matter of the dispute. Now, however, we can relive the tale, for Michael Taggart has been back to the archives of West Yorkshire and the House of Lords to find the local and personal details, as well as the state of the law at the time of litigation. His readable book also sets the problem in the wider contexts of public ...”

“... widely used by writers as different as Salinger in ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ and Michael Herr writing about Vietnam in Dispatches. During the months he lingered in Havana, Crane frequented a number of bars, cafés and cantinas, listening to the talk, smoking incessantly and nursing a beer or two into the evening hours, when he went home to ...”

“... which is one of its numerous subjects. There are some striking photographs, which evoke ancestral powers or places, especially graveyards and ranches. Photographs, too, of Edie herself. These commemorate an androgynous beauty, the effects of drugs, many, many fucks. It is hard to tell quite where the history of a ‘family’ begins, which father or ...”

“... the creation of an unacknowledged arm of the state, carefully protected from democratic view, with powers to act against nations that were technically friendly, and against members of the public who had not broken the law, seems less than benevolent. The SSB was effectively buttressed against democracy, and quickly became a refuge for those disillusioned by ...”

“... most of the major developing-world producers were at one time or another ruled by the imperial powers and continue to bear the scars. Some, like Iraq, have borders that were devised by the imperial powers to meet their own needs and bear little relation to ethnic, religious or linguistic realities. Such regions are ...”

“... and the specialist vocabulary it inculcates. ‘Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act.’ But the headmaster refuses to drop it, on the grounds that it encourages his pupils ‘to be aware of the world around them’ – as if they weren’t already.News is a structuring motif in Trespasses: public events shadow private lives, transform ...”

“... Hoare, referring to recent acts of violence, claimed to have ‘been told that if we had had these powers two days ago it is very likely that we might have forestalled one or other ... of those outrages’. In the first two months after the Act was passed, 113 expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May ...”

“... the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... causing it to lose any of the immediacy and gaiety which makes it an ephemeral form. When Earthly Powers was passed over for the Booker Prize in favour of the first volume of William Golding’s seafaring trilogy, the choice was between a ‘serious’ work, which time may or may not agree to be a masterpiece, and a light novel on a heroic scale, which seems ...”