“... long timescale of global warming has often made it hard to mobilise a majority against damage that may occur decades, or even generations, in the future. That timescale no longer looks quite so distended, after the last few years of serial disaster – fire, storm and flood – but air pollution provides an even more urgent motive for change: millions are ...”

“... conceit that he can destroy the Iranian regime by a method short of war; on the other hand, Trump may actually be tempted by the promise of military action in Venezuela, where the US can show its muscle quickly and with impunity.With these new advisers, Trump is more thoroughly committed to war than he may have realised ...”

“... among its workaholic staff, and an alleged affair between Kinder and Lay’s personal assistant may have caused a rift between the two men. Kinder’s replacement, Jeff Skilling, was a ‘big strategy’ man rather than a tight-wad. He was a Baker scholar from the Harvard Business School – in other words, in the top 5 per cent of an already elite MBA ...”

“... with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, and ‘to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the Agreement and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement’. This was a million miles from a long ...”

“... very quickly as prices and the pattern of orders shift. An algo-sniffer or statistical arbitrageur may have a little more time: I’ve been told, for example, that statistical arbitrage programs may hold a position for as long as a day (and in some cases even longer) before liquidating it. Even in those cases, however, an ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although ...”

“... of the age imposed a precise geometric order on the pastoral scene.’ New as the geometric order may be, chasing after hares is as old as any ancient rite, but who or what is hunting the hare in Turner’s painting? Is it just a train, and how familiar, really, is that location? You can shut down the iconographical interpretation of art, with its artistic ...”

“... in front of the open doorway was a sign that the owner was not in and nobody would enter.’ It may also be relevant that neither the Inca nor the Aztecs had the use of iron.With Enrigue’s encouragement his translator, Natasha Wimmer, keeps certain words in the original. In a sense the cihuacoatl of Tenochtitlan is the mayor of the city, but mayors are ...”

“... there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated polygons that can cover an infinite plane without repeating patterns. The triangles and ...”

“... ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that while attention to violence against women may be sparked by anger and a desire for redress, it might also be feeding vicariously off the forms of perversion that fuel the violence in the first place. As feminists have long insisted, sexual harassment occurs whenever women find themselves in the vicinity ...”

“... of women admirers and aristocratic protectors he met and corresponded with, the women who were or may have been his mistresses, even the children he enchanted with his stories – all these form a network of intimate relationships stretching across almost the entire Continent and centred on the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy, whose decay, collapse and ...”

“... spectacle it afforded: the almost physical manifestation of Trump’s deference to Putin. It may happen again, whether as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds ...”

“... little place is The Little Town! But for me it’s only a temporary setting. While this letter may seem harmless in tone, it is an example of the lifelong rivalry between the brothers, which Thomas felt more keenly than Heinrich. It was a gentle way of twisting the knife, letting Heinrich know that his brother had not merely written the definitive novel ...”

“... of the system. The judgment that finally disabled the policy was given in the Court of Appeal in May 2004. The court ruled that the government would have to make sure that asylum seekers had an alternative source of support before it withheld NASS money, since a failure to do so would infringe the asylum seekers’ human rights by depriving them of food and ...”