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“... There is an old belief still prevalent in West Africa that many women send forth their souls on night-flights while their bodies are peacefully sleeping: they meet other women’s souls, their okra or sunsum, on the tops of banana trees, where they work magic. The Ghanaian novelist, B. Kojo Laing, makes use of this theory in his story of modern Accra, Search Sweet Country ...”

“... vicarage where I grew up.’ And among the books in that study was Bannerman’s Birds of Tropical West Africa; and in Volume III there is a drawing of a pennant-winged nightjar. ‘I thought it was the oddest, the most desirable bird in the air. I still do.’ Somehow, you almost believe him. Through all the bands of soldiers with ‘swagger sticks and ...”

“... in effect governed by a single political regime: Israel is responsible for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as South Africa’s white minority regime was for the inhabitants of Transkei, Venda and the other Bantustans. On 14 January, the UN called on Israel to ‘ensure swift and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for the Palestinian ...”

“... to its excellent beginnings. The explanations greatly exceed the action in volume and complexity. Anthony Cronin has left himself so much expository work to do that the narrative tends to lose itself in conversation. The plot forks and dwindles, and the overall contours of the story are those of a ragged old parsnip. But if the plotting flags, the humour and ...”

“... about family and school. Born at Gospel Oak, Betjeman moved up with his parents to better-off West Hill; fans will remember his touching invocation of the house there (‘Deeply I loved thee, 31 West Hill!’), as well as some very subtle verses (‘Lissenden Mansions! And my memory sifts/Lilies from lily-like electric ...”

“... Anthony Eden should be living at this hour. He would hear the President of the United States say: ‘Half a century ago the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. I pledge to you we will not make that mistake again.’ He would see the United States, uninhibited as she apparently was in 1956 by the separation of powers and the prerogatives of Congress, move with sureness and speed to confront a dictator in the Middle East ...”

“... novels were done made them look like the literary future, not just to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... Jacobo Timerman believes that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘We’re all Palestinians,’ he declares. And he also declares: ‘I have discovered in Jews a capacity for cruelty that I never believed possible ... I fear that in our collective subconscious we are not perhaps repelled by the possibility of a Palestinian genocide ...”

“... charged with treason. Mira, his second wife, died in 1968, his younger son, Oleg, defected to the West in 1972 and his older son, Svyatoslav, accepted French citizenship in 2000, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Still the archive remained sealed, nikomu ne vydavat’ – not to be seen by anyone without the written approval of the Prokofiev ...”

“... to the RIBA; lectures that he supplemented by showing 16 mm colour films of life at Taliesin West, the Arizona winter home of his peripatetic architectural family. Wright had been invited to speak as a ‘Modernist’ in much the same way as a speaker today might be invited to lecture as an ‘Environmentalist’ – and as far as can he discerned from ...”

“... most to the development of the ‘plastic’ self has been the process by which, in the West, family size has been permanently reduced. This has led to a decline in the mortality and morbidity of women of child-bearing age, and an accompanying, if not necessarily consequent reduction in the restrictions on their economic, affective and intellectual ...”

“... life have its messiness, and let the book pay the necessary price in terms of formal imperfection. Anthony Powell’s four-volume memoirs, published from 1976 to 1982, are something of a masterpiece in this mode, combining a deceptive casualness of manner with an almost epigrammatical density of insight. Its pen portraits are, in an unassuming way, extremely ...”

“... missile system with an 800-mile range was about to come into service in Argentina, I contacted Anthony Terry, under whose byline the story appeared, at his residence in France. From Terry, and by dint of cross-checking, I discovered that Italian and West German rocket experts have been developing the Condor missile at ...”

“... is very similar to that of a very different kind of MI6 book, from St Antony’s College, Oxford. Anthony Verrier’s Through the Looking-Glass is written with MI6 experience, which is a plus, and is enfeebled by his incapacity to name names and his willingness to act as an apologist for his MI6 friends. These are two large minuses: on Ireland, for ...”