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“... second volume of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan, excellently and informatively edited by David Daniell. In Buchan’s social outlook there is a strong ‘zoological’ streak (somewhat recalling Kipling). It is strong in The Half-Hearted, which I happen to have been rereading. People in this novel belong to ‘kinds’. Lewis Haytoun, when unhappy ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade. Aunty Selma picked this key up in a hand spotted with age. She is 90 now and her facial skin hangs in folds, but her grey hair is pinned back in ...”

“... was also a shift in the balance of power where the gas war was concerned. Few of the statistics David Stevenson gives in With Our Backs to the Wall, his book about the conduct of the war in 1918, are as striking as those involving poison gas. The Germans released 52,000 tons of gas on the Western Front, twice as much as the French and three and a half times ...”

“... by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on innovation as such. Rather, it is a call for a new way of thinking about technological change, not as a sequence of ...”

“... been international waters. Icelandic gunboats towing net cutters would slice through the steel cables British trawlers used to drag their nets behind them, while Royal Navy frigates tried to keep the gunboats away. Hardie was fishing with a group of twenty trawlers one afternoon, dragging his nets at the standard three and a half knots, when a ...”

“... Stewart in Georgia and Fort Lewis in Washington: men with hair cropped to a quarter of an inch and steel-soled jump boots. The Dutch merged Marines, Military and Civil Police to form the Special Assistance Unit of the Mariniers. The West Germans, who have no Federal police force, selected a unit of commandos from within their border guards, the ...”

“... jobs and food, but excluding Social Security, Medicaid and unemployment insurance). To this Mr David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (who found the book about single men so Promethean) responds with optimism. Of 16.5 million poor people (living on less than $12,600 a year for a family of four), only ‘47 per cent would suffer a ...”

“... and friend. There are at least two reasons for this. The story has often been told, notably by David Cannadine, of how the long agricultural depression broke the power of the British aristocracy, but it also drove tenant famers and labourers off the land and into the cities and suburbs; a million or more had emigrated by 1914. As a legacy of this flight ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... serve as the title for dozens of the stories in this book. A man loses a one-of-a-kind Star of David while swimming at Atlantic City; ten years later, he finds it in an antique store in upstate New York. A woman living in Washington DC is mistaken by a stranger for another woman; years later, in San Francisco, the same stranger bumps into her and repeats ...”

“... Vienna. She adapted the sgraffito technique, achieved with bird bones in the Bronze Age, using a steel needle instead. There was also something of the abstract reliefs of Ben Nicholson in the subtle play of white glazes in her work from this time. Not every experiment came off. An inlaid stoneware vessel decorated with a form like a seed head comes too close ...”

“... cultural production and intellectual property ‘might generate the same wealth and envy as its steel and cotton had done centuries before’. The story of the former pirate radio station Kiss FM is instructive. Founded by Gordon McNamee in 1985, when the pirates were the only stations that would play the new dance music being made by Black artists, Kiss FM ...”

“... as pain, as malformation, as stunted growth. In this novel, as in his earlier See Under: Love, David Grossman reveals himself as a compassionate epidemiologist for those who experience history as inexorably degenerative disease, for lives which might be said to suffer from history as claustrophobia. For Grossman in both novels, as for Grass in The Tin ...”

“... writing: ‘Long before Cincinnati’s triumph could occur, the highways of America turned to steel, and Chicago, the junction point of the rail system and the Great Lakes, became the city of promise, the place “about to become” or “sure to become” the key city of the Midwest. Later, the highways of the country turned to concrete and ...”