“... not the final answer, after all. If someone else is found to have taken Madeleine McCann – as may well be the case – it will show that the ordinary life of an ordinary family cannot survive the suspicious scrutiny of millions. In one – completely unverified – account of her interrogation, Kate McCann is said to have responded to the accusation that ...”

“... turn of the screw, there is the narrator’s own mistress, who is close to his father in age and may be willing to keep the older man company in his son’s bed. These scenes are heartbreaking, crude, funny, despairing. In the end it is the father who keeps his dignity and the son who loses his, just as it is the son who vomits up his booze, not the ...”

“... areas to build positions for artillery, rocket launchers and tanks. Despite their efforts, on 20 May 2015 Islamic State fighters took the modern town and the ancient site. Their first target was Tadmur Prison. Within days they made a show of freeing the last captives and released a video of the foul interior. On 30 ...”

“... actions and reactions is insistently framed by the word, the ideals it evokes, the way it may be mocked or exploited, and the question of whether virtue resides in character or is only realised through what someone does or doesn’t do.This moral uncertainty extends into Virgil’s handling of some of the foundational tales of Roman history. When ...”

“... another can be the crux of litigation on which billions are at stake. For this reason, inflation may be the UK’s most controversial national statistic. It’s certainly the most consequential. It moves markets and it determines monetary policy: it moves markets because it determines monetary policy. But none of that is a price collector’s immediate ...”

“... trilby. Harbourside deer. Memories occupy my mind like bright lights in an urban void: symbols you may not understand when I report them; yet a word in earnest may at times transcend ... Thousands of miles from you, I slip my clothes off. Bed-lamp lit, these sheets look fresh as a new envelope. I’ll turn the hot tap till ...”

“... and his nagging wife – We keep the templates safe in our bank vaults. But as I write this down I may uncover That ring of majesty I know is stored In words, and by retrieving it I may Dredge cool epillia from the image-hoard – Thus while each word remains I will discover The source from which the magic rays are sent And ...”

“... distinguish a message made of logs: ‘Return to the frontier or all is lost, though in time some may reap the benefit and glory of a frozen attitude.’ My mind was made up. We would start for Illinois that very day. Have you considered firecrackers? The deft music contained therein assuages all contenders. Those who arrive last at the party receive the most ...”

“... some years ago; the bitter taste still lingers on, and I have a grudging sense that Jane Fairfax may not be quite as thin a dish of gruel as that. Instead it has an unappealing, mixed-up wrongness of flavour. It wants to be both like Jane Austen (to substitute for the real thing) and to revise Jane Austen (to be a real thing itself). Aiken disastrously fails ...”

“... be honest, without pretensions; the poetic problem, or part of it, that to strip away all colour may leave only a faint wash. Because the language is so neutral, it is the form in these lines which eye and ear find themselves debating. A slight awkwardness can add charm and authenticity: but when I come to the tenth line, which has the right number of ...”

“... us now, when the axis of global economic power is tilting away from the West. Whatever else it may have been, the Cold War was a family quarrel among Western ideologies. If it is true that the Soviet side lost, it is also true that Western civil societies did not win. For the ending of the Cold War at once removed the legitimacy which they acquired from ...”

“... confusion of university teaching and gunnery instruction. Drilling the principles of Greek grammar may be appropriate to the methods of the army classroom. But to help young people explore for themselves the strange, foreign cultures of Greece and Rome is an activity which ought to bear as little resemblance as possible to explanations of the workings of a ...”

“... including the ‘fear’, as Tom Wilkie writes in Perilous Knowledge, ‘that the project may open the door to a world peopled by Frankenstein’s monsters and disfigured by a new eugenics.’ Wilkie, a physicist turned science journalist, provides a lucid, serviceable primer on the technical developments that have made the Human Genome Project ...”

“... is better entitled than most powerful people to a contented old age. The sadness of that portrait may after all be no deeper than it is proper for any sensitive person of 80 to feel as he surveys what seems to have been an unprecedentedly greedy and uncivilised community. This interesting autobiography is in the end, like most autobiographies, an unsatisfying ...”

“... with its gleaming, sterilised surfaces, its mechanical wheelchairs and pain-killing drugs – may successfully serve as the subject-matter for poetry. Sissman’s great strength was his self-mocking sense of humour. The man who could see the cancer within him as a ‘tissue of fabrications’, or a row of surgical instruments as a ‘service for ...”