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“... liquid bottle (‘cleans, no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to ...”

“... she tweeted. ‘There is a reason they teach this in classes.’ When the police killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was playing with a toy gun, she said that Rice shouldn’t have shown such a ‘general disrespect for law enforcement’.In 2015, Obama acknowledged that there were more guns in the US than ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... fix the problem before its cost in blood and treasure agitated public questions. As the journalist David Halberstam emphasised in 1972 in The Best and the Brightest, the experts were less than wise. More important, the making of far-reaching overseas commitments without a Congressional and public consensus was a formula for political failure at home and for ...”

“... The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce ...”

“... the other hand, seems wonderstruck by Paul’s efforts in the kitchen: ‘How did Paul know that rice vinegar and unsmoked bacon were the ideal accompaniment for sea bass?’ She savours his cooking, as Davey neatly puts it, in a manner that has ‘more of the bed than the stove about it’. There is little hope that the situation can be reversed. Paul’s ...”

“... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...”

“... The End has become a marketing opportunity; it sells anything, even (in the TV ads) Uncle Ben’s rice. Meanwhile, over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked ...”

“... and run. Even up in our little mountain village, my £150-a-year licence, cosy sofa and bowl of rice crackers give me the reassuring feeling that I really know what’s going on in Japan. The casting can only be called inspired. Playing the female lead has been Makiko Tanaka, 58, the former Foreign Minister, mother of three and only daughter of Kakuei ...”

“... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...”

“... when two tiny tufts of pale feathers sprout from either side of its head, making it look like David Ben-Gurion. Though these tufts last only a few weeks, and aren’t often noticed, they give the bird its name. How was it possible for me to see so little of a bird I thought I knew? And to know so little of a bird I thought I saw? Perhaps it was the ...”

“... to roll his own snot and smell his farts in the swimming-pool. He likes cereal, too, especially Rice Krispies: ‘I particularly liked the three elves on the packet. I wanted to have elves like that, to keep as pets. Snap, Crackle and Pop would be useful little helpers for me.’ Sixty pages later, John has discovered Liquorice Allsorts (‘I was going ...”

“... can do well among the political elites in this country: ask Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. But in any case Hillary Clinton is unlikely to stumble: she’s an alarmingly disciplined candidate. Barack Obama first came to national attention when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. He was a state senator at the ...”

“... browsing along the book-lined walls when the noise of the blast came through them as if they were rice-paper. For a moment the world went into negative. Everything that had seemed substantial, so securely there, myself included, felt transparent. The only solid thing was that sound. A little closer, it said, and you and your friend and all her books would be ...”

“... of malice, poison and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,’ says the narrator of the title story: ‘I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.’ Jones is not much concerned with the cultural or ideological dimensions of the war, beyond noting the bizarre moral warps which convert ...”