“... A scientific law will accurately predict an outcome, given certain initial conditions: where a stone will land if launched with a certain force at a certain angle; the colour of your unborn child’s eyes. But there is no other Earth on which to run experiments. So climate scientists build models using known physical laws, then test and improve them with ...”

“... And certainly, the un-Tolkien-like tweeness of J.K. Rowling’s coinages doesn’t help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of ...”

“... those years, all those boys, they pass through your hands and into the blue. And never come back, Harry; they never come back … Give the boys the will to achieve. I’ve always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be achievement even in defeat. Make them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, the sacredness of achievement, in the form of ...”

“... ministers, came and went, and in Sir Kevin’s case the Queen felt she might simply be a stepping-stone to those corporate heights for which he was undoubtedly headed. He was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and one of his publicly stated aims (‘setting out our stall,’ as he put it) was to make the monarchy more accessible. The opening of ...”

“... saying I needed to have evidence.He wanted me to have specifics, ‘actuals’, but the trail went stone cold after he sent me a long email with links to articles in a number of newspapers and links to publicly available council documents, all of which showed the councillors he named behaving like Tories, and Feilding-Mellen behaving like a man who made ...”