“... to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming. One of our clients was a matchmaking company, which operated a number of neighbourhood storefronts where lonely hearts could flick through albums with the pictures and profiles of potential partners and leave messages in numbered ...”

“... the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A few hours earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu had addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing the organisation as a cesspool of antisemitism and vowing to press on with ...”

“... was really true. I hated earrings. I hated police cars and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.Vance’s parents, Beverly and Donald Bowman, separated ‘around the time I started walking’, and he went years without seeing his father. ‘He became kind of a phantom.’ His mother ...”

“... and associate of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was the world’s third richest man. By the end of the month he had lost much of his fortune, after being accused by the US-based research investment firm Hindenburg Research of pulling the ‘largest con in corporate history’. Facing allegations of fraud and a ...”

“... parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug. Raves were initially met with curiosity by local police officers stumbling across warehouses full of smiley, chatty people. But as the parties grew, they were soon deemed a threat. In ...”

“... A, was ‘the destructive element … the thing that’s not permitted’. More helpful clues can be found in the book itself, which shows Mira A’s illicit narrative breaking down in a riot of blank pages, typographic games and untranslated Latin. The novel ends with the word ‘silence’, a touch of Hamlet in a work otherwise closer to The ...”

“... Britain’s military campaign in Egypt in 1882. Subsequently, he attempts to redeem his reputation by undercover activities in Sudan. The seven film treatments of the book – the most recent was in 2002, starring Heath Ledger – foreground the martial aspect of the story: the extended British military offensive against the Sudanese religious leader, the ...”

“... a serious learning curve. The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up exercises and footwork drills. The moment they step on court most of them become nervous wrecks. They lie about line calls and bicker over the score; if they lose, they ...”

“... into practice as the 28th President of the United States. Wilson’s Presidency was compromised by a world at war and marred by the reach of his own urgent ambition. Still, Wilson set the tone for the new power-seeking, crisis-invoking Presidencies of the 20th century when, in his first inaugural address, he ...”

“... score-settlers. This key office of the new masters exudes smugness, oafishness and fear (might it be their turn next?). Every so often, a clerk is winched up towards the ceiling on a precarious pulley system, a file is taken down, and another execution is assured. Once your dossier has reached the Bureau there is no way of avoiding the tumbril – except ...”

“... up the dossier on him. Billy is like a stage-manager: he teams up with Guy, furthers his career by getting him an interview with the head of the Communist Party, and introduces him to Jill in the hope that the two will fall in love, which they do. It is entirely owing to Billy’s manoeuvrings that Guy wins a respected position among the other journalists ...”

“... thought of as ‘straight’ history and her clothes have been stolen and shared out by her offspring, with continual squabbles over who wears the trousers. Intellectual history was tardy in asserting its separate identity and still has trouble in getting recognised – what is it, after all, but the history of intellectuals, ...”

“... Mantegna and Degas and many others. He evokes such ghostly optical presences all the more strongly by avoiding the direct references often made to them by painters or by ‘pictorial’ photographers. An eye with Cartier-Bresson’s deep artistic sympathy can register and store the traces ...”

“... achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its subject-matter, its narrative technique and the preoccupations of its characters. From the very beginning, The Beach announces itself as a book about cliché and fantasy, about the pleasures of life projected onto a mental cinema ...”

“... animals with an identical complement of nuclear genes – clones, in the vernacular – could only be achieved by means of the transfer of nuclei from embryonic cells, and then only in non-mammalian species. There were excellent grounds for insisting on the impossibility of cloning from adult cells. For, although virtually ...”