“... It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he ...”

“... work hard for authors who are already successful, well-known; in fact, the more famous an author is, the more publicists work for them, the more attention these writers get, the more famous they become, in a nice, cosy circular ...”

“... the Advancement of Science. One important aim of the Association was to give stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry in England. The predominantly rural and individualist tradition of nature-appreciation, which had long blended comfortably with the activities of the poet and natural theologian, was slowly made to seem quaint and ...”

“... Cabinet and gave his regime an air of respectability. It was only gradually, as he began to feel more comfortable, that he tightened his grip. It took him over six months to arrest Abiola, the hapless chief having realised that he had been duped, and almost another year to charge two retired generals with coup-plotting, one of whom was Olusegun Obasanjo. No ...”

“... in the form of electrical discharges) in response to colours. Other groups register edges – more specifically, the orientation of edges. One group may be sensitive to vertical lines; another to horizontals; others to diagonals inclined this way or that. These registrations of edge collectively attend to the shapes of objects. Yet further sections of the ...”

“... of State. Frank is surely right to accept on that basis, even though he’s by now forgotten more about the details of the system than Harriet will ever learn, rather than consign himself to the back benches at the very beginning of a government whose attitude to welfare reform he has already done so much to change. Harriet, as it happens, used to be a ...”

“... increasing weight; to his immense satisfaction he found that in the later stages of his obesity St Thomas Aquinas had had a semicircular piece taken out of an altar so he could continue to say mass, but in the winter of 1915 he dieted strictly and listened to his wife play the piano with greater attention. When the Italians declared war and advanced on the ...”

“... whole way with fatherly stories of his time trading uniforms with American seamen to see who was more handsome in them. He will ask you to write down what your book is called so he can buy it for his daughter. Halfway through the journey, I looked down at my phone and saw that Jason had texted me a picture of his face turned in profile, having just thrown up ...”

“... feeling some years in advance of the Channel Tunnel. On the surface, there would appear to be no more connection between the Stalker affair and the students’ case than the accidental fact that both developed in Manchester. What analogy could one draw between the public activities of the Deputy Chief Constable and the academic pursuits of two third-year ...”

“... themes. I want to praise the epistolary Burns, who is deeply interested in his own poetry, but has more of the byre about him than the lyre. There is more to the poems he made up for himself and for his first friends about the tasks and pleasures they pursued together, and to the poems he wrote about his art and about its ...”

“... coming back, as in an account of one hundred successful attempts to quit smoking. The problems are more durable than the solutions. Herbert’s poems are varied and innovative in form, virtuosic in technique and full of surprises. They juxtapose biblical images with images from Herbert’s own world, making the former fresh and the latter spiritually ...”

“... below), the essays in ‘The Body Politic’ turn to the subject of Aids. Here, too, but somewhat more straightforwardly, language is seen as something that buoys up the Establishment, and explicitly or implicitly downgrades the feelings and experiences of a minority group. In ‘Aids: Keywords’, Jan Zita Grover runs through a lexicon of Aids vocabulary ...”

“... City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel. I got to know both of my travelling companions during a brief period living in the town of Marfa, Texas, which is also where I found the truck, parked in front of the post office: boxy, banged up, covered in sky-blue house ...”

“... of equality to Jews and Arabs alike. The Right was less reticent: they admitted their desire for more land and fewer Arabs. With British help, and then despite British interference, the Zionists got both. The release of Israeli records over the last twenty years has led to a reappraisal of a century of Zionism by a new generation of Israeli historians ...”

“... never be known, since records of it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as ...”