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“... there are risks. The attentive reader will want an adequate recompense for his attentiveness. The white gap that follows each fragment is a space within which its significance will reverberate: an elliptical novel can subside dolefully into a series of flat notes. Of the two, Wrinkles is the more original and interesting. It consists of forty-odd biographical ...”

“... through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress’. Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during ...”

“... walls with glue – are well preserved. Däräsge Maryam, East Wall of the maqdas. Archangel Michael; Mary and Child (with donor); archangel Gabriel (right) blessing Ephrem. The sacrifice of Isaac; Jacob and the Ladder; Moses and the burning bush; Moses receiving the tablets of the law. Zechariah and the vision of the lampstands; the arc of the ...”

“... his camera’s eye. Antonioni underlines this doubt in a spectacular closing scene. A group of white-faced student mimes, whom we saw at the beginning of the film packed into a jeep, waving and yelling and apparently collecting funds for rag week, now shows up in the park, and two of them mime a tennis match without any visible ball or racquet, the rest of ...”

“... the future Catherine the Great, rides her horse up the steps of a palace dressed as a Cossack in white fur and uniform, and demonstrates a ruthless appetite for rule. I had retained only the vaguest notion of the long first part, when Dietrich is an innocent child, a sort of babe in the Russian woods by way of Prussia. Of course, my failed recall is more ...”

“... the film adds to this effect. The movie is in colour but it feels as if it’s in black and white, and this impression continues even as we recognise that we are (mentally or materially) in a cinema that’s still open.A good example of the other effect is the fate of a jigsaw puzzle the wife (Chloe Maayan) of the leading character (Zhu Yilong) has ...”

“... that destructive ‘restoration’ – stripping everything off – was initiated by the men in white coats against the advice of the men in bow ties. And it has to be admitted that such destruction was often the responsibility of much-vaunted scientific techniques and remedies. A few medieval effigies in this country have been damaged by dilettante vicars ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... if she can’t bring herself to take his voice off the answering machine. ‘It’s not black and white,’ Didion remembers a young doctor saying in 1982 about the condition of a niece who was on the point of dying, a proposition that finds its way into Didion’s novel Democracy, where the sceptical and uncrazy heroine says: ‘Not black and ...”

“... over Niagara Falls. The incident caused disquiet in Washington. British forces, having torched the White House and Capitol in 1814, were again intervening on US territory. Diplomatic representations culminated in an exchange of letters between Lord Ashburton, special minister for the negotiations, and Daniel Webster, the US Secretary of State. They agreed that ...”

“... to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham Lincoln have long since become a cottage industry. FDR’s elder cousin, Theodore, who occupied the White House from 1901 to 1909, has not exactly been ...”

“... Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California President, was the subject of a celebratory film: it was introduced, as Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation ...”

“... describes at some length his fantasy of being alone with her on a Caribbean island, she wearing a white see-through dress with nothing underneath. The talk of erectile tissue prompts Malcolm to quote Lord Rochester, which leads to an argument with Lady Antonia about whether or not Rochester is ‘porno’ – Malcolm’s word – during which the New ...”

“... play an overt role in judicial appointments. Tribalism may soon become the determinating factor in White House decision-making as well, for George W. Bush and his entourage don’t deal in shades of grey. As far as they’re concerned, the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, us and them, are perfectly clear; and within this world of absolutes ...”

“... A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes a good excuse to look back at the spiky virtues of ...”