“... the Horsburgh Light, the Petro Ranger’s Australian captain, Ken Blyth, found himself surrounded by armed men on the bridge. A dozen pirates, faces covered in balaclavas, had apparently boarded the tanker from a small craft that the crew did not see. They put a machete to Blyth’s throat, then another to his scrotum, and told him he must order the crew to ...”

“... home was to get on the phone to rich and famous people whose numbers we knew . . . pretending to be the Water Board, and ask them to turn on all their cold taps because there was a “build-up in pressure” under their house, with a risk of explosion.’ He and his friend would give them the number of other celebrities, pretending it was the emergency ...”

“... tells us more about Heaney’s poetic aims than about Mahon’s experiments – so was he piqued by Heaney’s habit of characterising what he admired in others in self-descriptive terms? Or did ‘dividend from ourselves’ and ‘high yields’ trigger resentment at Heaney’s financial security, now that his Nobel Prize ‘doubloons’, as he called ...”

“... is led to a vision of crystalline purity. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs, each of which is independent of every other, are configurations of objects. These objects would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been ...”

“... entered the small French town of Oradour-sur-Glane, herded most of its population, swollen by refugees, into barns and garages, the women and children into the church, then killed them with firearms and grenades. The panzergrenadiers had been informed that Oradour was a hotbed of Resistance activity and were seeking revenge for the abduction nearby, on ...”

“... to think of it, that didn’t go so well the first time). For Remainers, it was always going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day.’ What was surprising, then, was that some Leavers too were a little fractious. Even before Big Ben had failed, as it turned out, to bong in celebration of the UK’s ...”

“... its licence fee income of £3.8 billion is either too much or not enough. In a world dominated by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, it’s ever harder for the BBC to keep up. It is estimated that Netflix alone will have spent upwards of $12 billion on content in 2018. It has a global audience of more than 130 million, a figure that is increasing ...”

“... American Wife is being contrasted with the Oliver Stone movie, W., in which Bush is portrayed by Josh Brolin as a drunken buffoon who turns his life around, becoming a sober, powerful and born-again buffoon. Sittenfeld, a Democrat and a liberal, may be doing more to humanise the Bush administration than all the press ...”

“... that despises them … I lived in the monster and know its entrails – and my sling is that of David.’ The next day he was killed by Spanish troops at the battle of Dos Ríos. For three more years the Cubans fought alone against the Spanish. Then, in April 1898, the United States entered the war against a now exhausted ...”

“... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 ...”

“... of Special Branch after being declared a security risk,’ that he ‘had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he managed to kill Taseer’ and that ‘many in Elite Force knew of his plans to kill Salman Taseer.’ Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers ...”

“... The village of Shrewton lies in the valley of the River Till, overshadowed by chalk escarpments, about four miles from Stonehenge. One of my ancestors, Charles Light, was the pastor of the Zion Chapel, a Baptist church there, in the second half of the 19th century. Charles’s younger brother, Henry, was also a Baptist minister, preaching in Chitterne, the next village ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories ...”

“... her tunic’ – but she evidently doesn’t reciprocate. They’re young: ‘He wouldn’t be one of those boys who turned up at a girl’s house unannounced.’ He’s tall: when he stands up after putting her suitcase down, he ‘knocked his head against the bald light bulb’. He has recently arrived in England; the fittings and fixtures in the flat ...”

“... biologist at the University of Minnesota, passionately defends what turns out – weirdly – to be perhaps the most hated bird in America. I knew that ease of identification wasn’t everyone’s criterion for affection, but I hadn’t realised the depth of loathing the bird inspires, or considered the federal policies that facilitate its destruction. Linda ...”