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“... escapes Walcott’s rational grip: elsewhere one is too aware of him press-ganging images into the service of an idea. This is especially true of his poems about the United States, which have too many smartly appropriate similes (a New England church spire like a ‘harpoon’, an Appalachian miner’s wife whose neck tendons are ‘taut as banjo ...”

“... minority of the population who are lucky to have supplies provided for them by a publicly financed service.’ So much for the one bright book of life. In addition to his own fieldwork, Mann draws extensively on the statistics which the British book trade and Euromonitor nowadays put out. From Author to Reader provides a handy digest of increased ...”

“... Masood since 1906, further stimulated by news from his friend Malcolm Darling in the Indian Civil Service, and well prepared by extensive reading. Forster went to India in an utterly receptive state of mind and his travels, recorded in a delightful series of long letters to his mother, served mainly to flesh out his ideas with particulars. War work for the ...”

“... to check any strenuous effort’ was a common deterrent to excessive involvement in a career. Robert Mackintosh ‘could continue to solicit from his father’s old friends civil service appointments with titles more impressive than the responsibilities they carried. There was no need for him to concern himself with a ...”

“... career, and on the worlds that shaped its characteristic contours. After teenage wartime service in the American Navy, Geertz went back to school at Antioch College, where he majored in philosophy and English. On graduation, following the advice of Margaret Mead among others, he enrolled for his doctorate at Harvard’s newly-formed, idiosyncratic ...”

“... He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he was transported by train to a prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, about sixty miles east of Dresden. The journey, more than four hundred miles on a slow train in high summer to an unknown destination, must ...”

“... Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow officers in the Marines disliked him intensely, and he failed to get promotion. ‘I have become a marionette,’ one of his friends in the Marines ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), exposed the corrosive effects of a culture devoted to money. The most overtly pro-Soviet films produced in Hollywood, Mission to Moscow (1943), written by Howard Koch, and Song of Russia (1944), written by ...”

“... operators lacked the plastic explosives necessary to drive them out. In April 2003, a Special Boat Service unit had to be rescued by coalition helicopters near Mosul. Before the invasion the talk had been of demonstrating British prowess to the Americans. But claims of expertise and finesse soon ran up against reality, even when faced with a military as badly ...”

“... air. The theorist André Belleau argues that, unlike novels, short stories collapse time in the service of a singular event; Serre’s stories of all lengths do this. (She’s noted that her longer books are always roughly the same 120 pages.) Her first sentences are ‘packed tight, like an egg in its shell’, middles are significant (when Guillaume ...”

“... in Asia in the 1940s and in Africa in the 1960s.’ Speaking as one who spent his National Service trying to kill Malayan challengers to the queen’s dominion, I would remind Patel how much violence and counter-violence was unleashed before those nationalisms achieved their ends: riots and strikes often put down by gunfire, guerrilla uprisings, the ...”

“... the camera), and because it showed to the full Karel Reisz’s sympathy for people who, in Robert Musil’s words, go out on an adventure and lose their way. This was a key element in all his films, whether they were set in Nottingham, London or Las Vegas. I think especially of the confused and manic Morgan in the film of that name, and of the driven ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with occasional trips to the fleshpots to indulge in ...”