“... grey, a three-decker pulpit, Jacobean altar rails and the remains of whitewash-blurred medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks ...”

“... whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, a Briton like Richard Hoggart, reared within a working-class milieu which seemed to be wall-to-wall. Hall was pitched between conceptual systems as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single ...”

“... shoulder blade, leaving a hole the size of a tomato; tissue and blood splatter the scratched-up wall; Butron’s heart has exploded. His head bangs into the wall and he bounces forward, landing flat on his face on the carpet. His excrement continues to leave his body for three or four seconds after he is dead.The rest of ...”

“... With his last breath the poor Cricket cried cree-cree-cree and then died on the spot, stuck to the wall. We are only in Chapter 4 (of 36) and already all our expectations must be overturned. In Disney, the adorable top-hatted Jiminy Cricket is Pinocchio’s perpetual companion, his ‘conscience’ as he goes on his travels. With his huge Mickey Mouse eyes ...”

“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”

“... to his cost, was not his strong suit. Hamilton’s obituarists were not timid in their assessment: Richard Dawkins called him ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless ...”

“... accept ‘Jewish colonisation’: it had either to stop or to proceed ‘behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach’. But there were other paradoxes. He said that he had no wish to oppress the Arabs, still less to ‘transfer’ or expel them, and he may have meant it. And yet not only did he insist that a Jewish majority ...”

“... and wild-westish the process became, take a look at a book by a former Texas mortgage broker, Richard Bitner, called Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender.† The invention which made it possible for the lending to become so reckless was securitisation: the process by which loans were added together and sold on to other institutions as packages of debt. This ...”

“... At any rate, there is a very strenuous blend of women-envy in some of the magazines for men. Richard Wollheim has just finished telling us, in ‘Germs’, his frighteningly good memoir extracted in these pages, about wanting to be a woman sixty years ago. ‘I knew that what I wanted,’ he wrote, ‘was, not so much to have her, though I also wanted ...”

“... of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of ...”

“... their Soviet counterparts, while Radchenko, lively and engaging but sometimes a bit off the wall, draws on exhaustive research in Russian archives and is particularly good on the ways in which the presence of China affected relations between the superpowers.The Cold War dominated world politics for most of the second half of the 20th century. In ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... aprons. Two of these were fashioned and the remainder of the skin hung as a partition wall in a public house in Keighley. Barely edible, often immobile, these were not so much animals as living monuments to man’s will to domesticate. But even within such bloated, breathing carcases, the wild boar remains. The differences between domesticated and ...”

“... of former colonies turned offshore tax havens: on its own the City of London is neck and neck with Wall Street as a financial centre, but if you include the offshore zones it’s estimated that a third of all international deposits and investments flow through Britain and its satellites. Moreover, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, most UK banks ...”

“... If you are not among the chosen, you can get yourself shot just by standing too close to the wall. In New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, Klein found poor evacuees living in ‘desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps’ where private security companies ‘treated survivors like criminals’. In stark contrast were the gated communities built in the ...”