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“... we have left behind. But the headlong momentum of the broken road, endured in a foetal crouch for so many miles, is swiftly absorbed when our modestly recompensed Asháninka hosts climb from their benches to greet and process the latest off-highway time travellers eager not only to witness but to participate in the old ways of the high jungle and ...”

“... on a different planet went wrong in the same way the old world did?’ People who don’t like SF think of it as a genre obsessed with techy-fetishistic questions: ‘What if the C9-G series intergalactic cruiser with the Krank mod could go faster than lightspeed?’ Or as posing the kind of bloodless questions asked by philosophical thought ...”

“... the provisioning of ships and processing of sugar, was accepted as an important part of England’s wealth. Slavery, itself associated with Africa and the Americas, happened elsewhere. Britons, proud of their liberties, ‘never shall be slaves’: slavery was a condition for others. But by the 1760s there were the beginnings of a growth in anti-slavery ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... Ryszard Kapuściński’s is the most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the collapse of the Soviet empire that I have read. Caustic and lyrical by turns, it is driven by that combustible mixture of love and loathing for their neighbour which Poles seem to have felt since the days of Mickiewicz ...”

“... quite contrary to their native qualities – marble flesh, wooden flowers, metal drapery and so on. The other takes it towards material for material’s sake, towards the pebble which lives by its pebble-ish nature alone. Nicholas Penny’s book shows how these forces are ...”

“... father and his grandfather; the accidental discovery of a terrible event in the family’s Wisconsin past; the break-up of his marriage; his consequent separation from his young son; and by a descent into depression and isolation that brought him close to personal collapse – out of which he was able to write himself. The experiences he ...”

“... If there is one pleasure available to mankind it’s doing what we’re not supposed to do – playing, fiddling, mooching, galooting and otherwise tickling our fancies. This explains, for example, why people come home early, or stay out all night long, why we sleep in, sleep over, drink to excess, write, read or publish literary criticism, and commit crime ...”

“... into the upper levels of the World Trade Center in 2001, songbirds had been in the habit of doing so, migrating by night and mistaking the lights high above the city for stars. At least one ornithologist used to stroll along the base of the towers in the early morning, removing small corpses and rescuing the living. A lot of species have been too fragile, too ...”

“... but its spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh declared that they should be gone by 2010; this fitted Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government ...”

“... gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, announcing, ‘I have never been able to understand how that thing works,’ and then slowly realising all the magical tricks this little rubbery object could do when suitably inspired? (‘She grasped the animal under study without ...”

“... with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century’. The pressure of this last question – or indeed of all three – is not to be collapsed into shorthand of the kind: ‘Wasn’t English landscape bound to be an exercise in ...”

“... of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian. I had recently finished a book on Edward Long, slaveowner and author of the celebrated ...”

“... of the Sunday Times. ‘She is increasingly out on a limb,’ Kinchen observed, listing Wolf’s top topics of the time, the anti-lockdown stuff and the anti-masking and the terror of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s hard-right War Room webcast. ‘Look, I’m a ...”

“... to greet the news that the UK economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the quarter-year to December. That’s as it should be, because this is as fragile as a recovery can possibly be, after six quarters of economic contraction. This is assuming we can trust the figures, which we almost certainly can’t, not because of government fiddling but because the data come in ...”