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“... of a better livelihood: to get their share of the vast amount of money the EU is now pouring into North Africa, or at least to recoup the losses that followed Nato’s destruction of Gaddafi’s distribution networks. (When Gaddafi’s son was released from prison two years ago, the citizens of Ghat celebrated in the streets with gunfire.) For others, new ...”

“... eros with wholesomeness, the kind of woman who could say no to Humphrey Bogart and go home with Paul Henreid. The people who are swept up into the world’s fantasy life may no longer be film stars, but they exist and they are vulnerable. Ask Yoko Ono. Nor has the demand for symbols of purity, even virginity, disappeared. Ask Lady Diana Spencer. The longing ...”

“... arrest by the ICC in Kigali in 2013. No voices in Africa could be heard protesting that Paul Kagame’s regime had used Ntaganda for more than a decade as a privateer and, according to UN investigations, had covered 80 per cent of Rwanda’s defence budget in the first few years of power by extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from illegal ...”

“... alien and a programme revealing the secrets of alchemy, both shunted from Scottish screens by ‘a Paul Coia quiz show about hills’ and a ‘cartoon series about Gaelic accidents’. There has been no better expression of the deeply Scottish suspicion that the English might be having more fun than we are. ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on,’ the ...”

“... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...”

“... of the bitter trials and struggles of the poor, of the grim divisions widening between the North and the South. These novels deeply impressed her contemporaries; but like all extrovert reportage they lose with time the power to be much more than scenic diagram and description. A telling detail thrown off in Dickens, the facts suggested or taken for ...”

“... called Kitty Hawk, in the Kill Devil Hills, a remote stretch of littoral on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In early September he moved there, and wrote a reassuring letter to his father about the experiments he had planned (‘I think the danger much less than in most athletic games’). Orville arrived at Kitty Hawk later that month. Faced with a ...”

“... the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle Peter for a while appointed himself the very man who would, as he delicately put it, ‘get all that poofy shite oot his heid before it really does him some damage’. Game on. But not for long. Uncle Peter arranged to ...”

“... from Iraq. Last October I wrote a piece about US soldiers bulldozing date-palm groves near Balad, north of Baghdad, to punish local farmers after an ambush; I immediately received a flood of outraged emails from the US denying that American soldiers would do such a thing. American civil and military leaders in Iraq live in a strange fantasy world. It is on ...”

“... Kinetoscope in 1895 by combining camera and projector in their Cinématographe. In Britain Robert Paul produced his own camera and projector when Edison refused to supply him with films. Paul also patented a design for a time machine based on H.G. Wells’s short story, in which a series of moving platforms would ...”

“... funding, its soldiers have failed to suppress the long-running Islamic insurgency in Nigeria’s north-east, to say nothing of the bandits, kidnappers, secessionists and herders who drive their cattle south, devastating farmland on the way. Parts of the country have been rendered ungovernable. To go to war with Niger, Tinubú would also have needed majority ...”

“... Beatle fan, still longing for a miraculous reunion, the fall from grace had been the break with Paul McCartney engineered by the wily Oriental Ono – dislike of whom was powered by racism as well as philistinism and envy. For the socialist, Lennon was irredeemably disorientated by his isolation from the realities of working-class life. For the aesthete, he ...”

“... over many arguments. Into the past (the dinnseanchas poems of 1972’s Wintering Out and 1975’s North, much pruned in the selection); into the present moment (beginning with the Glanmore poems in Field Work, his fifth book, published in 1979). Monosyllabic, consonantal, guttural words; a suavely Latinate diction and in the last poems even the heavy presence ...”

“... voting than social class or level of education, and a much better indicator than living in the North of England. The best indicator of all (according to the British Election Study) was support for the restoration of the death penalty. Similarly, the vast majority of Trump voters were traditional Republicans in traditional Republican areas. In the ...”

“... and utter meretriciousness, young-man-type showing-off stuff and genuine wisdom, is a bit like Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent film, Magnolia, which shares Coupland’s interest in coincidence and catastrophe and carpe diem. Do we really need or want to be told about life’s beauties and terrors by a couple of smart-arse ...”