“... grain is helpful. 9.3. Their eyes fell out. 11.3. The food was tastier that way. 11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt. 11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm. 4.1. To uncontrive. 6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag, 3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by ...”

“... kept their dogs. An exception was made for those registered before the policy was implemented on 1 May. But many dog owners weren’t notified and learned of the new pet policy from the TV or fliers from community organisations. Some heard nothing at all. A few days after the ban was announced, a woman named Iris posted on the American Society for the ...”

“... to train Saudi prison guards exposed the clash between morality and mercantilism. The balance may be shifting as security pragmatism is added to moral distaste to tip the scales in favour of getting tough on Saudi Arabia. The short-term demand for high-tech armaments contracts and longer-term oil and gas reliance may be ...”

“... verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous.’ As in Berlusconi’s case, the verdict may yet be overturned: the defendants have two opportunities to appeal, and the sentences will only come into effect if and when both appeals have been rejected. The judge who found the seismologists guilty hasn’t yet published his reasoning – he gets three ...”

“... or any of the events for things that might actually have happened. Conversely, the disclaimer may instantly arouse suspicions in a certain kind of reader: surely you need to deny that your characters are portraits of real people only if that’s precisely what they are. It seems slightly foolish, therefore, to draw attention to yourself with protestations ...”

“... elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently unassailable Tory stronghold – dwindle to a meagre 880 in 2001. A member of the Orange Order, he was one of the few MPs to vote against the Good Friday Agreement ...”

“... They found George Bush in the White House gym. He was working out.More paranoid readers may be able to detect some significance in the fact that tinyurl.com/bush sends you not to anywhere on the official White House site, but to a story from the 15 May 2003 edition of the Globe and Mail about an office block ...”

“... are called Leigh and Woodhouse, the one a Sheffield Wednesday fan, driven to authorship it may be in the hope of taking his mind off the poignant decline in the standing of that pleasingly named old club, the other a supporter of Aston Villa, or the ‘claret and blues’, as some of us were brought up to know them, though now that teams seem to take ...”

“... with flashbacks to events of the night before. ‘Call yourself a New Puritan?’ the reader may well indignantly ask, but this isn’t really breaking Rule No.5, because the flashbacks are actually occurring in the narrative’s present in the narrator’s hungover memory (and, as if further mitigation were necessary, one of his drinks was spiked with ...”

“... act in the conviction that what you are doing is right, regardless of any empirical evidence that may convince other people it is not right, good faith becomes a purely private matter, a state of mind inaccessible to investigation by committees, unless we were to have one drawn from the Institute of Psychiatry, rather than Butler’s cosy quintet of Right ...”

“... than art, offer a commentary on cultural, political and economic relations. But while they may on the surface seem to say pretty clearly what the makers and buyers thought of each other, they are, at another level, enigmatic. Views from Africa, a very small, very engaging exhibition at the British Museum until 24 July, displays a selection from a rich ...”

“... sisters Tilly and Molly Button now spread excitement without a word. There is a notion that Higgs may be named after the narrator of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in which case – nothing more arch than The Archers – are the Button girls a nod to Gertrude Stein’s nickname for nipples? It may become clear when, as will ...”

“... and black beside the pale-rose tint he’s given to particles of water drying on a letter, 6th May 1947, This is the glass in which I drink the fresh and perfumed wine of Alsace à ta santé. Tous les jours que tu n’es pas ...”

“... she herself didn’t have the word ‘scene’. She had the word ‘crowd’ instead. ‘It may seem very strange to every one nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse. But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd.’ This theory lies ...”

“... New York, though well-educated. A rapid marriage to a fellow student resulted in an abortion which may have left her unable to have children; there was a powerful Yiddisher momma inside her which displaced itself on the family of worshippers she both needed and resented. After getting in touch with Graves on literary business, she rapidly took in his ...”