“... a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn’t say anything at all. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘We would have been earlier but there was a slight ... ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of ...”

“... persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months before the election campaign, Hilary Benn announced a modest £50 million funding top-up for food and farming R&D over the next five ...”

“... necessity for baths. He does not believe in total immersion. To lose his natural oils would be to rob his body. A frameless square of mirror reflects in corrugated waves a cracked, dusty soap dish containing a quantity of black metal hairpins. On bright rectangles of paper blinds move the beautiful shadows of the pear trees. Although Bridget left the door ...”

“... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...”

“... in the landing gear of aircraft and die. By the end of the 1990s it was thought that the number of young women being smuggled into the EU every year from the former Eastern bloc and forced into prostitution was in the hundreds of thousands. It is not hard to see why the traffickers are vilified by governments, police and the press. They can foil the defences ...”

“... services, most of which remained dire. In the winter, higher bus fares ignited protests led by young left-wing activists in São Paulo. Police crackdowns amplified them into massive street demonstrations throughout Brazil. With increasing right-wing participation and backing from the country’s powerful establishment media, they swiftly became a ...”

“... British identity was in the classrooms and playing fields of English private schools. As the young ‘mongrel’ Edward Said was coming to realise, it was one thing to learn the words of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, another to appreciate that ‘this meant bright and beautiful England, the distant lodestar of good for all of us.’The muslin ...”

“... to the council in September 2013, before Newton went public with his plans, an EA official called Rob Millbank warned that no houses built on the site should have living space on the ground floor. He suggested the Quadrant could be ‘an exemplar in flood risk terms’, perhaps by offering ‘an area of community safe refuge’ during a flood. This notion was ...”