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“... with modern weapons, amán! amán!’ He was gazing into the distance, pensively twisting his white moustache with his forefinger. ‘They say the atom bomb – my granddaughter read me all about it, from the Kathimerini – the last atom bomb, I mean, that they exploded at – what’s the place called? Bikini? – in the Pacific Ocean.’I seized him by ...”

“... a strangled shout of ‘There is no justice!’ In Anne’s world there is a ‘dry, well-formed white bone of justice’, as Mary Gordon puts it in one of the incisive images which grace Men and Angels. But Anne’s justice is that of a heroine who knows herself, and is known by all around her, to be one of the Elect. People rally round Anne because, they ...”

“... that it would be wise to keep out of Baghdad for a few years. When it became obvious that the White House was determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein, I applied to the Iraqi Information Ministry for a visa, although I was worried about how safe it was to do so. Saddam Hussein wasn’t short of critics, and possibly the regime didn’t know or care what ...”

“... of England, and preserved the battered vessel and its chalk smudges as Object that Fell off the White Cliffs of Dover. Found consists of a slightly crowded exhibition in the museum’s modest ground-floor gallery, as well as numerous pieces dispersed elsewhere in the building, among historical artworks and displays about the history of the hospital. Parker ...”

“... No one overwrites quite like Patrick McGrath. In a crowded field, he must be British fiction’s most prodigious overwriter. He made his name writing intense, florid novels about ‘wild delusions, ungovernable passions’, ‘insanity and obsessive sexual love’ (his words). But in Port Mungo he has written a book so lush, so fruity, so gorgeous – so in love with Romance and Passion – that his own back catalogue pales into understatement ...”

“... entertainer’.(Dickens was stigmatised with the same term by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition.) Patrick Parrinder has been opposing such anti-Wellsian prejudice for the best part of a quarter of a century. His opposition takes the form of scholarly works which patiently mount the case for critical respect. Parrinder’s contributions include the Critical ...”

“... Bridge, but by the end the Dorati family’s vineyard and the nearby ‘clapboard church with the white steeple’ have come to loom much larger than anyone could have expected. Thanksgiving at the Doratis’ may fall short of Christmas at Dingley Dell in some respects, but it is here in a harvest festival atmosphere that John’s real claims on Liz’s ...”

“... equipment and wear bullet-proof vests. A few years ago they were driving round Baghdad in ageing white pick-up trucks that had been used to take cabbages and cauliflowers to market; now they have second-hand Humvees. Well paid by Iraqi standards, and backed by US air power, the army was expected to perform better. Yet, in towns and cities across southern ...”

“... just been kidnapped by ten masked men. Could they have taken seriously the line pumped out by the White House and Downing Street that the dangers of Iraq were being exaggerated by the media? They behaved as if they had. Some reports of their abduction said they lived in the affluent al-Mansur district, the embassy quarter of Baghdad. Their house is certainly ...”

“... to 180 pounds. The hardest part is picking out the bad guys. About half of Iraqis seem to drive white pick-ups.’ Von Eschenbach said that anybody could shoot at a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher – it required only ten minutes’ training – but a surface-to-air missile was more complicated. He suspected foreign fighters were at ...”

“... via California and Yale, where he was a friend of Bush’s daughter Barbara before joining the White House speechwriting team in 2003 and rising through the ranks during the lame duck years. This time around the intended audience seems to be 11-year-olds of all ages. In the acknowledgments Bush calls Michel – or maybe Michel calls himself – ‘one of ...”

“... heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy and eventually the first president of Botswana, for marrying a white woman; the refusal to take a tougher line against apartheid – it has been essentially vindicated by the current harmonious relationship with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British ...”

“... Patrick Modiano’s fiction is intricately caught up in time, as he himself says. ‘The great, the inevitable subject of the novel, is always . . . time.’ And more interestingly, less portentously: ‘I had the mania of looking back, always that feeling of something lost, not like paradise, but certainly lost ...”

“... who are just beginning life can be seen to be much more grown-up. All the infirmities of age – white whine swilling, importunate bladders, evenings beginning after breakfast – thrust us firmly back into the needs and the atmosphere of being young together. And so Alun (at school it was plain Alan) Weaver and his wife Rhiannon come back to South Wales ...”

“... Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, published in 1963. Moynihan’s chief contribution was the chapter on the New York Irish, a lament which begins: ‘New York used to be an Irish city ...”