“... hired by Gupta businesses.After Zuma’s downfall in 2018, a commission of inquiry led by Justice Ray Zondo found that the Guptas, aided by the president, had cajoled, threatened and bribed civil servants and politicians to help their businesses. The report describes how the ‘Zuptas’ replaced the heads of government organisations and diverted ...”

“... The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. He has a 1953 story, ‘The Playground’, where a father makes a pact with the powers of evil in order to substitute for his son in the battle. He’s sucked back into memory and finds himself miniaturised and skinless all over again: there were ...”

“... admission often specified some weapon-related topic involving uranium fission (more recently ‘X-ray lasers’, a subject of interest in relation to advanced thermonuclear weapons, has been popular), but they were firmly guided into some project that was considered harmless, such as the preparation of ion sources for atomic or nuclear experiments. These ...”

“... While Gillespie with his two epistemes of positivism and creationism had to relegate Owen to a no man’s land of ‘nescience’, where the quest for a mechanism of speciation was allegedly abandoned, Desmond provides the perfect corrective. Owen did in fact toy with a mechanism which took for its analogy the complex life-cycle of parasitic flukes: ‘He ...”

“... thought encompassed the notion of degeneration but not extinction.) Some naturalists, such as John Ray, simply admitted they didn’t have all the answers. John Woodward of Gresham College reconciled the Flood with the emergence of fossils by imagining a slurry of water and soil that deposited different objects according to their weight. Over time, he ...”

“... about the war, were adaptations of novels. In the first scene of Le Silence de la mer (1949), a man leaves a suitcase on the street; another man opens it to find, underneath some pressed shirts, the 1942 novel of the Resistance by Vercors on which the film is based. The pages of the novel reveal the credits: a device, as ...”

“... novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ...”

“... the latter is busy with her left-wing patter – , and, contradicting her, the vicar, a timid man (large Adam’s apple), with a brown-eyed, canine squint, chokes upon a nervous cough. 3 Tea stronger than a Munich beer. In the room the air is hazy. In the hearth a flamelet lazy gleams, like a butterfly on boulders. I’ve overstayed – it’s time to ...”

“... Before basic training he qualified to be a Special Forces sergeant through a programme called 18 X-Ray, which was designed to ‘augment the ranks of the small flexible units that were doing the hardest fighting in America’s increasingly shadowy and disparate wars’. One senses that the gamer in Snowden got the better of him here. He had hardly been a ...”

“... descendant of Talbot’s line of thought.Talbot predicted that photography would ‘make every man his own printer and publisher’. But it was a woman who first saw the new art’s potential in that domain. Anna Atkins, the author of the first photographically printed and published book, was a contemporary of Talbot’s and had been known to the members ...”

“... bob cut. Iona couldn’t tell why but she had been sure the next person in the villa would be a man. That was just how shows like this worked – girl-boy, girl-boy. Evidently that was wrong. If it was going to be a girl, though, this kind of girl was perfect: dark where Iona was blonde, petite where Iona was tall, classy-foreign where Iona was ...”

“... wartime internship in a psychiatric hospital, was translated in 1988. But his earliest SF novels, Man from Mars and The Astronauts, weren’t. Lem dismissed them as mutilated by a subservience to Soviet ideology. So his career in English begins with two novels published in Poland in 1959. His turn to science fiction was in the spirit of other Iron Curtain ...”

“... it. Six months earlier, Vivienne’s mother had cancelled her daughter’s engagement to a young man who had already been approved by her husband, and there was a good chance she would intervene again. She had reason to feel that marriage, and the possibility of offspring, were not advisable in her daughter’s case, given her history of recurrent ...”

“... minister, from the left wing of the party, once described by the Sun as the ‘most dangerous man in Europe’, who in 2005 split from the SPD and took tens of thousands of followers with him to join forces with the ex-East German communists of the PDS. Out of that coalition emerged Die Linke, arguably the real alternative for Germany, which the entire ...”

“... a large fragile fossil embedded in stone, or the mummified remains of a three-thousand-year-old man preserved in a bog, his prunish face flattened and smeared and warped, like a face pressed against a windowpane. I had once seen one of these men stretched out in a museum, and looking at him in his glass box, every joint visible beneath his dusty film of ...”