“... about a molehunt in the upper echelons of what she referred to as the Fairground had her pegged by some as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing, self-deprecating self-portrait: in the universe that Herron has created in his Slough House series, the headquarters ...”

“... Its most recent eruption was in 1944, the latest in a series of eruptions that began in 1660. By 1737, which saw the sixth of them, it was apparent to a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples, who had seen the ‘inextinguishable fires’, that Vesuvius afforded ‘ample matter for reflection and writing’ and for ‘modern philosophers a ...”

“... as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as ...”

“... depictions of violent behaviour for the reason that it unnerves and depresses me gravely to be confronted by the cruelty that human beings have a perversely inventive and unlimited capacity for. I know very well that evil exists. Some years ago I met a serial killer in fact, though he was simply a carpenter as far as ...”

“... The​ kinds of catastrophe that loom largest in today’s collective imagination tend to be compact and spectacular: the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, with a 180-decibel boom heard more than three thousand kilometres away; the tsunamis of 2011 that reared up to a height of forty metres before inundating the Japanese coast; the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which claimed some 300,000 lives; and, most spectacular of all, the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula around 65 million years ago and wiped out about 75 per cent of all plant and animal life on Earth, including the dinosaurs ...”

“... the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day. There were ambushes, counter-ambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over ...”

“... that a person habitually says or does things that most people wouldn’t say or do. It might be that the character makes risqué jokes, or that he likes to abseil down tall buildings while wearing a pink Spider-Man costume, or that he’s actually just a pain in the arse. My intuition is that men are more likely to ...”

“... joined the Royal Artillery for the Second World War, before returning to school and then taking a BA and PhD at the LSE. He then taught at the University of Leicester for the rest of his (too short) life. ‘Energetic, enthusiastic, intellectually receptive, sociable, and ever on the watch for new talent,’ according to his friend and colleague Brian ...”

“... in thrall to the executive. Of every £1 raised in taxation, 91 pence is controlled and allocated by central government. The austerity programme pursued since 2010 has thrown into relief the vast power differential between central and local government: as chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne spent plenty of time talking about devolving new powers from ...”

“... and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he received his royal appointment he had abandoned the discipline in favour of a career in journalism, and does not appear to have been called in to treat the long series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually ...”

“... have been too thin; much of what we know about his life and crimes emerged from his interrogation by the Israeli authorities and from the vast research effort that went into preparing the case against him. It would in any case have been nearly impossible to fit the life and crimes of a relatively obscure lieutenant-colonel into the giant criminal enterprise ...”

“... By the wise contrivance of the Author of nature, virtue is upon all ordinary occasions, even with regard to this life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsOn 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon dioxide – the same protocol Al Gore as Vice-President had negotiated on behalf of the United States in 1997 ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned ...”