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“... If old sea-dog Thomas Coram’s mission had been to found the most English, the most 18th-century of charities, he could not have done better than launch the Foundling Hospital – which he did, its doors receiving its first infant in 1741. Till then, England – unlike other countries – had had no hospice designed for abandoned babies, though such an idea had been floated in a characteristic gesture of lay piety by Addison in the Guardian ...”

“... newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from ...”

“... publisher absolutely nothing. The writing costs are picked up by the employing university and by grant and fellowship-awarding bodies who expect no financial return. The publisher’s payments to the author – before and after delivery – are nugatory. CUP, for example, has been known to offer first-time contracts (for books with a predictable sale of a ...”

“... stare isn’t, of course, an emotion which the sane can much afford in real life: but we have to grant the premise that improbable things can happen, and bare possibilities have an uncanny hold on the mind which gives a force to ‘implausible’ fictions.One of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, the terrifying Psycho (1960), shows a young woman who steals some ...”

“... platforms of Sanders, Warren and Biden. They are Democrats v. authoritarians, though at least they grant that totalitarianism is dead. ‘They fall in with the common tendency,’ he writes, ‘and accept the Warfare State’s major postulate, which is the demonisation of enemies, who are set in opposition to an idealised self.’ This is a reasonable ...”

“... to Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. Only Erdoğan’s Turkey, which can now amply grant at least one wish of its electorate – that Afghans be kept out – and which can increase its fee for keeping Europe Afghan-free, has more to gain than to lose.American occupation has made the Taliban more disciplined fighters – with new elite ...”

“... to him. And the complex of Ahmad’s feelings towards a girl in his class at school, Joryleen Grant, is persuasively and sympathetically described, as are the edginess and hostility of his fraught exchanges with Joryleen’s aggressive boyfriend, Tylenol Jones (whose ‘mother, having delivered a ten-pound infant, saw the name in a television commercial ...”

“... autonomous, expressions of one’s deepest and most enduring values.’ I’m doubtful of this grant of authority to the competent former self, whose values have not in fact endured, since they mean nothing to the demented present self. On balance there may be no right answer to the question whether it is good or bad for that person to go on living in that ...”

“... prices, wages, amenities, facilities for saving and social policy. The authors, supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council, have analysed the replies with the aid of the SPSS computer programme and mapped the results. They have then set out to display and discuss the total picture. Proffessor Smout’s is the most original and creative ...”

“... What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters ...”

“... money to lease an usher’s pitch in a theatre. She had studied painting with Leroy, and also with Thomas Couture, and she continued to do illustrations and portraits to commission, as well as historical subjects, two of which were accepted by the Salon. Lipton didn’t manage to find any of her work, but established that she was a member of the Société des ...”

“... their own signed by dozens of legal scholars, including a great many progressive luminaries like Thomas Buergenthal, David Cole and Burt Neuborne. Other more right-wing figures vouching for Koh include William Taft, the State Department’s senior lawyer in 2003, who provided the Bush-Cheney administration with its legal rationale for invading Iraq, and John ...”

“... Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, published in 2006, was a scathing account of the invasion and occupation of Iraq; The Gamble covers the ‘surge’ that pulled Iraq back from the edge of the abyss. By 2006, with Bush still insisting that the war was going swimmingly and the Pentagon keen to hand the war over to the Iraqis, it seemed that the US was heading for a catastrophic defeat ...”

“... anecdote casting the artist in the role of perpetual adolescent. Nobody doubts that Dylan Thomas died of drink and a regressive, infantile personality: but the thing that is remembered about his last days is a remark (‘I’ve just had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record’) which superbly typifies the kind of thing his public would ...”

“... Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often ...”