“... He was on holiday in Florida at the time but he’d rung up the top brass in Libreville, including Ali Bongo Ondimba, the son and likely successor of Omar Bongo Ondimba, Gabon’s ruler for 42 years, who’d died a few weeks earlier. In 1967, Bongo Sr, then 32 and an early recruit to the French secret services, had been installed in the presidency by Jacques ...”

“... Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The heavens opened and the sky streamed ink; it poured with hope ...”

“... kid with EkaSystems Inc, and earning at least half a million a year . . . Alas, much of Zadie Smith’s second novel reads like this. (It’s better written, but she had two years, and I had two minutes.) White Teeth, for all its many miracles, occasionally revealed a cartoonish energy that at times seemed to amount to a fear of silence, a perpetual ...”

“... as Robert Oakley, the President’s special representative, was wheedling Aideed and his enemy Ali Mahdi Mohamed into a hug opportunity for the cameras.) Any questions about disarmament have been met by the commanders of Operation Restore Hope with an insouciant ‘don’t know.’ Though the troops stripped Aideed’s arsenal in the Somali Capital, and ...”

“... Not like here in Chad. He became friends with a Pakistani boy who lived near him. We called him Ali. When I got 14, Ali asked me: ‘How long are you going to keep washing cars?’ He knew I wanted to be a dentist. All my friends had teeth problems, but there wasn’t a good dentist for non-Saudis – they just pull your ...”

“... The ends​ of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four ...”

“... and their separation – could be used to create fiction for the age of lies. This is what Ali Smith has tried to do in her ‘Seasonal Quartet’ by charting the accidental collisions of different groups of British people – though these novels are also marred by the anger of the lie-ee by proxy, who is enraged not because she is herself ...”

“... with The Arabian Nights and have been retold in children’s books and films (‘Aladdin’, ‘Ali Baba’, ‘The Ebony Horse’, ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banou’), are probably Galland’s invention, concocted of pomegranates and ebony, damask and jasmine, in tribute to the style of the original stories.No early manuscript has been found for ...”

“... intention was to provoke more trouble following an incident four months earlier in which Altab Ali, a young clothing worker from Wapping, had been set upon and murdered by three men in nearby Adler Street. A photograph from the period shows a swastika scrawled on a wall above the message ‘We’re back.’ Today a park on Whitechapel Road is named after ...”

“... who in his long career seized more than 40 English ships. In 1940, the first shots in what Colin Smith calls ‘England’s last war against France’ were exchanged between the two navies. Before the armistice of 22 June, de Gaulle and Churchill had urged the French government to commit its large fleet and its 400,000-man colonial army in Africa to the war ...”

“... Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness ...”

“... able to buck the national trends, though unpopular local ones (hello Lembit Opik, hello Jacqui Smith) couldn’t rely on general goodwill to see them home. Yet in the cold light of morning, once the dust had settled, and before Cameron and Clegg decided to stir it all up again, this looked like a pretty conventional sort of result. A tough economic ...”

“... with a bombardment, and it more or less ends with one too. In the spring of 1799, Admiral Sidney Smith’s naval squadron bombarded the coast at Acre, in what is now Israel, and effectively put an end to Napoleon’s dream of marching on to India in the wake of Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, another demonstration of ‘shock and awe’ lit up the ...”

“... music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity are identified, and minutely differentiated, by their music tastes. The characters in The Black Album tend not to be pinned down by their music tastes. Chili, the central character’s brother, is, in ...”

“... head. Mr Rafi’i’s job was to teach seminarians the sayings, sermons and letters of the Imam Ali. For Shias, Ali is the supreme example of a just and generous sovereign. During his caliphate, he is said to have bought two shirts and offered the finer to his servant. His judges were so independent one found against him ...”