“... fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. It may sound reductive, but among the many wonders of this sometimes flawed book is how richly its single-mindedness illuminates its subject, and how forcefully it makes the case that the subject merits serious consideration. Though I’m partial to crime ...”

“... another naturally occurring psychedelic, and the alcoholic brew known as chicha, and that they may have countered the nausea that often accompanies San Pedro with movement and song. ‘The architecture of the complex seems to have been designed to frame and create a spectacle in which the senses were manipulated by sound, light and spatial disorientation ...”

“... of the child’s “innocent” sadism as he humiliates the lamb,’ she says. ‘Sadism’ may take it a bit far: I don’t see much sign that the child wants to torture his interlocutor. But when I started the essay I didn’t think I would be convinced at all, and by its end the poem looked quite different. That’s literary criticism.Ionly met ...”

“... venerated antiquity and suggests a promise (however empty) of social benefit. Whatever Versailles may not have been, it certainly was a public building, a stage set for the sovereign to play the spectacle of power.’ But the same could be said of the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, who aim to draw businessmen and tourists by the jet-load to witness the ...”

“... after their ravages. So although Chapter 8 has been excised on legal grounds, the curious reader may infer its contents from the index entries on Esther Williams, the ‘million-dollar mermaid’. These include: ‘Williams, Esther, egomania of’, ‘nauseatingly self-justifying autobiography of’ and ‘vow of revenge taken by Cheeta’. However, those ...”

“... the ‘crystal-hard egoism’ of the prince by relentlessly exposing him to his own inadequacies, may well have done more harm than good. As one of Nicky’s Russian cousins later put it, ‘the education that was given us atrophied our powers and limited our horizons.’ It would be unfair to blame the teachers alone. The parents, with the exception of ...”

“... of French women, but she also suggests that another, equally helpful model for American mothers may be found closer to home – in American fathers: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge ...”

“... blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.’ At which point, you may well be wondering: and I’m reading this historical paedo-snuff because? But then you take another look at that last sentence, and notice the way it slides – undergoing, you might say, a blood-soaked transmutation – from ‘magic’ to ...”

“... winnowed out the slower links, and now only three firms remain in the race. (A fourth competitor may be about to emerge: it seems a new network is being built by Scientel, a specialist telecommunications firm with origins in the nuclear power sector. Scientel is probably doing this for an undisclosed HFT client, but I haven’t been able to discover whether ...”

“... charmingly refers to as the ‘ubiquitous cigarette’ (recte, the inevitable cigarette: it may always be there, but it knows its place) looks shrunken to a bidi. ‘Quappi in Grey’ (1948) I take Beckmann to be one of the great painters of the 20th century, his life one of the great 20th-century artists’ lives, and his diaries, the Tagebücher ...”

“... London. A montage on the dust-cover promotes a man called ‘the Prince of Darkness’: we may wonder if this satanic figure is ‘Mister Big’ – a successor to the famous Kray brothers, a capo of the Mafia, a leader of the Yardies or the fiendish Chinese Tongs. But no: he is a veteran crime reporter, diabolically nicknamed for his habit of wearing ...”

“... angle, much the same picture. Temperamental difficulties, personal rivalries and momentary pique may again have played their part, and the sheer complexity of the policies made them even more arcane. Though the logic of the situation was that Lawson had to go because of the Prime Minister’s intractable hostility to his strategy for monetary integration ...”

“... If a mother takes female hormones through part of the pregnancy, for example, her boy child may look physically male and have a masculine range of abilities and mental traits, but be attracted to men rather than women. If the female hormone interferes at a different point in pregnancy, the physically male child ...”

“... driven by the desperate assumption that in co-operating step by step and delivering the many it may be able to save the few. The offices of the Community are a labyrinth of clattering typewriters and cluttered desks and stacked files, relentlessly grinding out their results of classification and alphabetisation and – the barbaric term fits here ...”

“... Whatever may now be the state of the market for A Shropshire Lad, the poetry of A.E. Housman has certainly been among the most read of the 20th century. Or in the 20th century, for the earlier poems belong to the end of the nineteenth. When A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896, it was at the author’s own expense; presumably it did not then look like work that would attract the public ...”