Search Results

“... I sometimes lie in the darkness Glad there is nothing I can see To blot the pictures in my memory: Sunlight in a fallen tree Where I hung on the wilting branches; Woodlarks circling in the sky Or folding like a bell into the heather; Blue light hardening to die Out of which there hurry faces, Lips, smiles, a sudden frown, A body white in the bracken, Raindrops where the leaves lay brown, Water, pavements, water, A fence where the starlings preen – I compel them through my memory, Never asking what else might have been ...”

“... an administrative clerk for the provincial passport office, was shot in the head and died. In May, Nasrin, a police officer, was shot but survived. A week later, Leila, a 25-year-old student, was kidnapped while walking to school, supposedly because her sister, a well-known poet, was ‘too loud’. It was rumoured that Leila had also been raped. Half of ...”

“... The Dari word​  qachaqbar means ‘the one with illicit goods’, but when I hear it in Kabul I don’t think of drugs or arms but people. Afghans have been leaving since the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, but after 2014, when foreign troops pulled out, the leaving changed pace: in 2015, more than 200,000 Afghans left for Europe alone. Every Afghan friend I had in Kabul – even those with a chance of doing well at home – told me of their visits to qachaqbars ...”

“... Seen from a helicopter or from an aeroplane the garden appeared to be no more than a green shape amid arid country where there was a reservoir and quarries and a private airstrip. Just beyond the garden on the far side of the house was a red tennis-court and a swimming-pool that was not properly regulated, so that even from the air it looked slimy. But for the children, who could not get out of it, the proportions were different: the garden was their world ...”

“... parents lying on the bed, his father reading a newspaper and his mother a sentimental novel.) It may seem a ridiculous thing to do, but there is a widely accepted, politically correct version of this procedure in which ethnic, sexual and other minorities rewrite their past in a more positive, self-assertive vein (African Americans claiming that long before ...”

“... process of modernisation which had characterised the Fifth Republic from its inception. De Gaulle may have given up Algeria and the French empire with an ostentatious reluctance, but the very idea of de-colonisation was part of modernisation. The French Army, it was said, should not be confined to social welfare and sentry tasks in uninspiring parts of ...”

“... for Tadeusz Slawek Yesterday, the weather in Warsaw was the same as London’s: ‘Sunny; 18°’ (sixty-four Fahrenheit). I am sitting in a walled garden drinking gin, the fading sky as blue as this tonic water loosening its bubbles against the flat ice. What is in the air? The first midges; a television three doors down, its hum like this lone bat avoiding the walnut tree ...”

“... in question by the fact that the revealer is revealing it. The Rousseau point of view – you may not need to know this but I need to tell you – is merely the converse of the darkly enigmatic self-tormentor, with his one virtue and a thousand crimes. Good writers soon grasped that the best way to deal with this hero is to place him in the most equivocal ...”

“... I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in front of that stupid painting she likes, she’ll talk about going out to shovel the steps before it freezes, maybe she will go out, slip on the steps and kill herself, that will stop the shaking, no doubt! I should go in ...”

“... cannot be recovered’? It is a beguiling thought – though Blair’s understanding of radicalism may prove to be only distantly related to the usual interpretation. A more reliable guide to the future is likely to be found in the mantra the new Prime Minister repeated on the threshold of 10 Downing Street on his first day in office: ‘We were elected as New ...”

“... the marshlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the camp is now abandoned and looted, but in May 2005 it was a busy centre of military operations. Amara has seen many reversals of fortune and opinion: it was once a hideout for anti-Saddam insurgents, whom he punished by draining the marshes. He also killed many of them, and buried their bodies in mass ...”

“... some of us than that made in an opposite direction by E.M. Forster). As correspondents he and Sand may agree on such matters as the avariciousness of the bourgeoisie or the harm Catholicism has done and continues to do to the condition of France, but more profitably they diverge, writing at a tangent rather than directly to one another, and sparing us too many ...”

“... here. May I touch your                                                                           name. Your ...”

“... him: ‘you have … justly earned my approbation’; if he carried on down the same path, ‘you may go on to deserve the applause & esteem of/An impartial honest man’ (the last phrase in lieu of a signature). It goes without saying that in issuing his reproofs Godwin had only the best interests of his correspondents at heart. His letters to Amelia ...”

“... eighth or even ninth volume of an ambitious American project to publish all Gissing’s letters may reveal whether Gissing kept many of Clara’s letters to him. It seems that he did not. Gissing would have been gratified by this culmination to a continuous, if small-scale industry of studies, biographies, selections of letters and diaries, and ...”