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“... of myth and of ‘beauty’ which were a sort of educational guidebook for the reform of the West. But there is none of it, so far as I can recall, or very little, in the Pisan sequence. There is some grumbling about usury: but for the most part Pound’s politics exist there as ‘the dream’ (opening line) which has collapsed with the defeat of ...”

“... The professor​ from the West Coast stepped out of the taxi and looked around, head tilted back and swivelling from one looming grey tower to another as she assessed the flint-studded concrete ramparts of the library. ‘Oh, wowww!’ she cried, ecstasy lifting her voice above the wind whipping off the marshes. ‘New brutalism! Rarely seen any so pure ...”

“... If Haile Selassie, whom some remember as a bit of a biker from his days of exile in the West of England, had been stretched to 6’3” and given a part in Easy Rider, he would have looked rather like Tom Coraghessan Boyle as he appears on the front of the Collected Stories – an improbable confection of soulful eyes, hollow cheeks, frizzy facial hair and black leather ...”

“... vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”), and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’. This powerful formulation is not free from problems; as Friedman’s book makes abundantly clear, the distinction between West and East, Us and Them, long ...”

“... now to groups incapable of fighting a war at that pitch? Also on the platform that night was Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA member and Long Kesh prisoner, and a very articulate and often funny critic of Gerry Adams. McIntyre’s cynicism about the peace process has not gone down well with the Provo leadership: Sinn Féin organised a ‘picket’ outside ...”

“... throughout the Occupied Territories. Jerusalem is the prime political target but Gaza and the West Bank are the worst economic sufferers. We get into Gaza after a 50-minute wait at the checkpoint; the Israelis provide only one soldier to process the documents of the long queue. Gaza is more than ever like a vast concentration camp because now it has two ...”

“... was mixed. He spent more than a decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only after he realised that anti-slavery enthusiasts within the Society of Friends would be happy to proceed without ...”

“... Gaza, Palestine’. His father was Abu Jihad, commander of Palestinian military operations on the West Bank. On meeting him, Friedman thought to himself: ‘That’s amazing. From Che Guevara to Dale Carnegie in one generation.’ The book uses these nascent Americans to make the point that everyone wants to do the best for themselves and their ...”

“... into women’s history began. Rowbotham moved from a middle-class Tory Methodist upbringing in the West Riding to a London whose streets were paved with Marxism-Leninism in the approved manner of the times. A restrictive girls’ boarding school where she read extra-curricular Sartre and Kerouac and practised being Juliette Gréco in her time off, the Sorbonne ...”

“... the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to Stonehenge: there is no monument). The Imber ...”

“... purchased. This policy culminated in the Proclamation of 1763, which declared the entire continent west of the Appalachian mountains off-limits to white settlers. Of course, settlers ignored the Proclamation, as did land speculators like George Washington, who instructed his agents to buy as much Indian land in the west as ...”

“... Tim Lott’s first novel, White City Blue, came out in 1999. The narrator, Frankie Blue, is a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty ...”

“... like Lermontov and Pushkin, by the Gothic and acrobatic fantasies of Walter Scott and Anthony Hope, and by the ludicrous posturing of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. We do not think, because writers rarely tell us, of the thousands of mediocre casualties, the mutilation, bullying, trickery and waste. Even Kiernan, who has presumably no liking for ...”

“... demonstrates a firmness of intention which makes the title slightly fraudulent. In the Wild West idiom, ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta to do’: but when and where a man has ‘gotta’ write an autobiography is a matter for debate. The interesting question is why Mr Mortimer chose this moment of his life to write this book. One senses a ...”

“... Monica; the Venice Lido; the beach at Barcelona; the abandoned pool at Williams’s house on Key West. Williams was buried at sea, as he’d wanted, his body dropped into the Gulf of Mexico where Hart Crane fell overboard and drowned. ‘I’ve always admired the gentleman,’ Williams said, ‘and I never had the opportunity to meet him.’ The pool at the ...”