“... curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of ...”

“... defendants start taking the stand; but since that isn’t expected to happen until the summer they may well – who knows? – be on holiday by then. But the particular reason this trial hasn’t been worth reporting is that all the main elements of the prosecution’s case were widely known long before it began, were known, in fact, before the suspects were ...”

“... When the queen came to Ireland in May 2011 a number of the great, good and merely deserving were locked in the 1937 reading room of Trinity College Dublin for two hours without their mobile phones, before being allowed into the beautiful Long Room of the Old Library to await her arrival. The ratio of men to women was about the same as you find at the front of the plane – five to one perhaps, of suit to skirt – and the conversation veered towards the kind of disaster that happens when Wives Are Not Invited ...”

“... d’être is or was being of the centre, came close to being eliminated at the general election in May, and it’s fantasy to believe that the Conservative Party now occupies that position. Those who argue that Labour should move to the centre, the party’s perpetual ‘modernisers’, are in practice suggesting that Labour should adopt policies wholly ...”

“... and little considered constitutional implications – makes it much harder to know what may happen if there is no clear winner. Opinions about how easy it would be to engineer an election before the five years are up vary from no problem to no way (the truth is probably somewhere in between). What’s more, previous nail-biters were straight two-way ...”

“... human sentiment’. The ratio of reverie to dramatic incident will be unusually high, though there may well be a sudden flurry of events near the end. In The Blue Guitar our man is Oliver Orme. He ‘used to be a painter’ but he gave it up. (In a taste of strained puns to come, he says: ‘Ha! The word I wrote down first, instead of painter, was ...”

“... But in Roma he stays at home, or goes back home: to Mexico, to the past, to the family. The title may not suggest home to many of us: we’re not bound to know that Roma is the name of a neighbourhood in Mexico City, any more than we have to remember that Petty France is in London and Little Italy in New York. But then home isn’t always what we think it ...”

“... wild roots and by theft: come and lay down your arms … so that your thirst and great hunger may be appeased.’ Today, only a small stone memorial in the Omaheke desert marks this crime. In Bengal, the East India Company secured hegemony by force of arms over a once prospering land. According to the governor, Warren Hastings, as many as ten million ...”

“... Nixon, Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Losing 35 seats (that’s the number as I write; it may go one or two higher) puts him right in the middle of the range. He did much better than most of his predecessors in the Senate, but that was in large part because the electoral map favoured him, as it did in 2016. Many things about the campaign were ...”

“... more obviously symbols of affluence than others. Randolph Hearst’s Neptune pool at San Simeon may be the most opulent pool ever constructed, with its elaborately tiled floor and surrounding statues, colonnades and classical façades. The second most opulent pool may be the indoor ‘Roman’ pool Hearst built at his ...”

“... straitjacket of filth.’ Or David’s wife, far from celebrating the possibility that her husband may have a second chance at a cancer cure, bitterly thinks: ‘No, it will be a second agony.’ These post-anomaly chapters are both the least ‘experimental’, employing traditional psychological-realist plotting and characterisation to elicit genuine ...”

“... in Germany during the Second World War. But it is a long journey and, after 1050 pages, one may be left wishing it had been slightly shorter. Giovene seems to have put everything in, banal incidents as well as interesting ones, boring people along with some good characters, and he does it all in a style which is often elegant but never humorous. At ...”

“... mother, an ineffectual father, intimations of incest ... But wait a minute, Josie’s imaginings may be no more than that: imaginings. Her brain isn’t working too well, they tell her in the hospital, she is a starving organism and her brain is starving too. She knows better: she is closer to pure, elemental consciousness than ever before. It’s the ...”

“... Surprising though it may be to the British public, Mrs Thatcher is one of the most popular Western politicians in the Soviet Union, especially among the apparatchiki. It follows that the British Prime Minister is often a central figure in discussions among people on the left of Soviet public opinion. The experience of ten years of Conservative radicalism in Britain is too important historically to be ignored ...”

“... se va ni se muere. He won’t go and he won’t die. He resigned the presidency and left Bogota in May 1830, making a trip down the River Magdalena into the tropics, ostensibly on his way to take ship for Europe. He died near Santa Marta, on the Caribbean, in December of that year. Garcia Marquez’s novel recounts those last months of Bolivar’s life but ...”