“... prevent legislative paralysis – the so-called gridlock. The persistence of the old party labels means little as of now, and will probably mean even less in the future as four de facto parties continue to develop under two party labels. As for the Clinton Presidency, its failure can be dated very exactly to 26 August 1994, when the last attempt to enact ...”

“... jokes and puns, and farcical escapism: Rushdie, Grass, Pynchon in his most recent novel, David Foster Wallace, even Zadie Smith. In novels by those writers, we have lately encountered terrorist groups with silly names, a genetically engineered mouse, two clocks having a conversation with each other, a giant cheese, a baby who plays air guitar in his ...”

“... of price, price, price. Most company mottoes and advertising slogans are bullshit. Wal-Mart means what it says: ‘Always low prices’ – a slogan which on some of its stores now simply appears as ‘Always’, in the knowledge that its customers can be trusted to complete the thought. The first Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, its ...”

“... that Alvarez has just produced. Oppenheimer is persuaded, and immediately understands what it means. He tells the younger physicist that splitting the uranium nucleus can cause a neutron chain reaction and the release of an enormous amount of energy: ‘A bomb, Alvarez, a bomb.’The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, transmuted pure theory ...”

“... and poured from chutes into the holds of the world’s largest fishing fleet, queuing up for the means to chill their catch before heading for northern waters. When the ships came back they’d bury the quayside in haddock and cod. There were six hundred trawlers in Grimsby in the boom years of the mid-20th century, and each good-sized deep sea vessel had ...”

“... of a Palestinian homeland since, despite the commitments, muffled as they are, of the Camp David accords, no such idea has as yet managed to find an enabling vocabulary within what is considered “reasonable” political discourse in this country.’ What needs to be added to Poirier’s astute comments is that the ‘idea’ of a Palestinian homeland ...”

“... official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded. The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from ...”

“... Bon Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for customers from the middle and ...”

“... known as Amal (both an acronym that stands for Detachments of Lebanese Resistance and a noun that means ‘hope’). Another was the rapid ascendancy of two Shia religious leaders, who, like al-Sadr, studied in the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq: Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. The decisive factor in the shift from Hope ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”

“... absence has required older ships to continue sailing long beyond their life expectancy, which means that they are often tucked away in dry docks under repair. Tourism and island industries of all kinds have suffered. Not for the first time, island people accuse the ferries of ruining the local economy and despise MacBrayne’s as a tyrannical ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”