“... Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there was nothing to do but toe the grass and stare up at the stars in the ...”

“... Although he lived with pain for the rest of his life, he was amazingly lucky to survive at all. By the end of the day, of the twenty officers in Tawney’s battalion, ten were dead and eight wounded; of 754 men, 120 were killed, 241 wounded and 111 missing. Twenty thousand British soldiers died that day on the Somme.If one were to search for an experience ...”

“... what went wrong, we can reflect on this historic election. The share of the total vote won by the two major parties changed only slightly, but Ukip replaces the Lib Dems as the third party by number of votes and the SNP is the third party in the Commons by number of seats and will ...”

“... her favourite subjects at school (art and drama) and what she wants to do when she grows up (be a dancer). Before surgery she needs blood tests so I go to find a tourniquet, needles, bottles and gauze. It’s a ward that I don’t usually work on, and every ward keeps its equipment in a different place. On top of this, the printer for the blood bottle ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life ...”

“... to unpack the bundles of accepted theory and to point out, in a manner which usually manages to be both pugnacious and good-humoured, what the actual facts were. As he says himself, British Imperial carries on the strand of thought from The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004) and even from The Lion’s Share, which he published as far back as 1975, the ...”

“... however forlorn, of ‘extending the pitch and consciousness of human possibility’. Entranced by the discipline of accreting such sentences as ‘Systems planning is the true American artform’ or ‘Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time’ or ‘He took out his hand organiser and poked a note to himself about the ...”

“... was bad,’ one of her co-workers told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The error was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times. The CIA completed its own review of the case in 2007. It turned out that Bikowsky didn’t have probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion – she had a hunch. ‘Available intelligence information did not provide a sufficient basis to ...”

“... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...”

“... states – Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Denied, as they see it, an independent Kurdistan by the cynical manipulations of the French and British colonial powers in the aftermath of the First World War, over the next hundred years they suffered serial and escalating repression: detention, torture and execution; the destruction of villages and ...”

“... of the poetry written in Britain in that decade. Soldiers Bathing was eventually published in 1954 by the Fortune Press, edited by the dubious R.A. Caton, who was perhaps deceived by its title into thinking it might align with the gay erotica his press also issued. Prince, ...”

“... to a monthly magazine called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into ...”

“... singular constitutional and legal history and a fear of monetary integration into a union created by other states to contain problems Britain did not share. Brexit is part of a larger reality in which the European Union must navigate faultlines deriving from its political structures and the turbulence beyond its borders. These faultlines were already evident ...”

“... of little scientific importance. Partly because of this indifference, the auction was overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of ...”

“... How​ long can you be absent before you are declared dead? Do you have any civil rights during this interval – which some societies set at the biblical seven years – or are you merely the target of legal action? What happens if you return and your spouse has remarried or the kids have sold the farm? Do you have any recourse apart from revenge? In Absentees, a book about the many ways, across time and place, that people have gone missing, been stripped of status, or become somehow undead, Daniel Heller-Roazen offers a typology of the ‘nonperson’, about whom it can be said neither that ‘he is a person’ nor that ‘he isn’t a person ...”