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“... elsewhere written that art is ‘on the side of the oppressed’, but she has also described the white liberal’s characteristic function as that of a conciliator between oppressor and oppressed. By this token the white South African novel seems to thrive on its own impossibility – a discourse that continues to demand ...”

“... school-children wearing ‘bashers’ (panama hats) in the streets of Harare are black as well as white. State television urges us ‘Towards a New Social Order’ where previously stern-faced white women would lecture us about security. (South Africa is invariably on Zimbabwean television described as ‘racist’, which ...”

“... raised. Even more charitable grinding has taken place just before on behalf of a living writer, Patrick White (the contradictory demands of national and international literary histories put many cabbages out of the chronological straight line). Where Beckett, whose prose fiction deserves more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of ...”

“... truth is, of course, that the GAN had long been written – for what is Moby Dick if not the Great White Whale as put down on paper by the Great White Male? But it suited everyone to disregard this fact. Today, with the dubious and decadent exception of Thomas Pynchon, there are no longer any ...”

“... decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval adventurer’.Hill’s attention had been caught by a chance reading of The Golden Ocean (1956), a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his ...”

“... We owe much to your country,’ the Anglican archbishop of Uganda told Patrick Marnham shortly before being shot in 1977. ‘We need you, and not just your knowledge; we need your fellowship. Most people here know this. What we have become, you made us.’ The tragedy of this statement suffuses Fantastic Invasion, the record Patrick Marnham brought back with him from a series of visits to West and East Africa ...”

“... to deserve the contempt of others. Explaining the way of the disciple taking the Path of Blame, Patrick Laude (a professor at Georgetown University and writer on Sufism) suggests that a typical malamati would eagerly confess along with Hamlet: ‘I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not ...”

“... and soliloquy are perfectly gauged. Ronnie, I think, could be held to be a precursor of P for Patrick Doyle in the new novel, A Disaffection. Both works end on a possible return, on what might look like a bleak diminuendo but is really an anxiety state. There are important differences, though. Kelman stands much closer to the new hero, and much more of ...”

“... Paul Watkins’s novel and Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque are second books by young British writers whose work has been well-received in America, to which, together with its surrounding seas, both of these writers have been drawn. Paul Watkins used, they say, to set off from Eton for spells on an oil rig, and after graduating from Yale he fished for three years off the New England coast, where this novel of his is located ...”

“... Certainly there is no other figure from the ancient world about whom we can know so much. As Peter White demonstrates, however, in his characteristically incisive and learned book, Cicero’s letters do not provide a window into his soul, any more than the numerous letters from his many correspondents provide a window into theirs (some of them seem to have ...”

“... poems, which contain lines like these, in ‘Star Damage at Home’, from the 1969 collection The White Stones:                               ... That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not shine above the skys and those cloudy vapours? That it really should burn with fierce heat, explode its ...”

“... or lifts a wristwatch to his ear then sighs before a table laid with shiny cutlery and a cloth so white it seems to generate its own light. The napkins’ beautiful, useless folds. The Summer of Love of Patrick Troughton’s puckish Dr Who of the dark-wood-and-mullion-doored bureau and the coal bunker, dwarfed by my ...”

“... Arab community against Isis is at the heart of the policy of both the Baghdad government and the White House. Between 2006 and 2008, the US financed, armed and organised the Awakening Movement to combat al-Qaida in Iraq, Isis’s predecessor, but it isn’t finding it so easy to counter Isis, partly because of the distrust and even hatred that divide the ...”

“... has been that democracy in Iraq primarily benefits the Shia, the religious parties and Iran. The White House and Downing Street aren’t very happy about this, but there isn’t much they can do about it, despite their manoeuvring. As American and British power declines, Iraq’s neighbours are making plans to increase the level of their intervention. Iran ...”

“... out seventy cars rigged to explode every day. He was expecting an attack on his ministry, a tall white building in the centre of Baghdad, and had just moved into a new house after a vehicle packed with nearly a tonne of explosives had been found near his home. He showed me with some pride a photograph of heavy artillery shells and a torpedo looted from a ...”