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“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... minced pork, tied up with string and cooked in a thick stew of carrots, shallots and tomatoes in white wine,’ she recalls. ‘I looked at my plate with sullen disinterest [sic].’ The logical next step is a house-makeover novel set during the Blitz. Francis Cottam gestures towards this when the hero of The Fire Fighter takes against the look of the ...”

“... It’s hard to know how seriously Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth ...”

“... form. Opposite views of the problem are taken in two contributions, but with arguments in neither. Michael Daniel and Dmitry Ganenkov review the wealth of cases in the languages of Daghestan; Peter Arkadiev considers languages with just two cases, after which other contributors focus attention on particular languages or language groups, including Ik (Christa ...”

“... appears at the start of the novel’s second chapter: Detective Ali Lateef – born Rufus Lamarck White – enjoyed anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers, and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra. When casework was slow he amused himself by inventing simple alphabets, usually of the phonogrammic type, and using them to post ...”

“... defenceless civilians abroad and at home, but his ventures into armaments produced a litter of white elephants. His massive kok-saghyz plantations took valuable arable land out of food production without ever producing a viable source of ‘plant-based rubber’. The shale oil refineries and peat-based fuel extraction plants were a costly irrelevance. His ...”

“... years (except in a few references to the Normans), but about four hundred. He credits Gilbert White, writing in the late 18th century, with being one of the first writers to praise the loveliness of trees. This won’t do. John Evelyn, a century before, had spoken of beeches making ‘spreading trees and noble shades with their well-furnish’d and ...”

“... bar’: by which, he explains, is meant the economically privileged position of the tiny white administrative class but, even more important, the strong sense of social exclusivity around that group. The black elites of British Africa were never offered the assimilationist possibilities that saw Senghor and Houphouet-Boigny rise to play executive ...”

“... behaviour might one day, in principle, be generated within the Internet. In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), the South African naturalist Eugène Marais painstakingly documented the natural history of the termites that build terminaries or ‘ant-hills’ on the open veldt. He astutely concluded that the terminary is a ‘distributed organism’: its ...”

“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... as it happens – and face down apartheid (Carter was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-racist). In the White House, with the new national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, at his shoulder, he set all this aside. His administration was as hostile to the MPLA as Ford’s had been. Shunned by the new figure in the White House ...”

“... for 1996, then 1998, then spring, summer, autumn and now late December 1999. An interesting white-knuckle ride for the politicians. The line has soaked up, so far, around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the ...”

“... narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza such as people have often made up by bringing together totally unrelated lines. It also ...”