“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Laurens van der Post and the born-again Brian Griffiths, embittered outcasts like Enoch Powell and Ray Honeyford, men like Bernard Ingham and John Hoskyns whose previous Labour sympathies made them oddities in the Tory camp, émigrés from Britain like Alan Walters, Ian MacGregor and Robert Conquest. Her Jewish Cabinet members were by definition marginal men ...”

“... of Keller’s essays makes, implicitly, the same claim. I believe it cannot be sustained. The man’s magnetism was almost wholly personal; and I would like to evoke and celebrate it before turning in more detail to the book which so regrettably fails to enclose it. During my teens and student days Hans Keller was already an established fact, stimulation ...”

“... sadly make us doubt their scholarly credentials. Jo Gladstone’s interesting study of John Ray quotes a passage that she attributes to Bishop Wilkins when it is, in fact, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and elsewhere she says that Thomas Blount ‘first used the title term “hard words’ ” when, in fact, it appears in the title of the ...”

“... there wasn’t any controversy: there was a crisis, for example, over the US installation of an X-ray imaging system known as CargoScan at Votkinsk in the spring of 1990: the Soviet Union was concerned that it might damage the propellant in its non-treaty-limited missiles. But rather than allow their differences to undermine the treaty, both parties continued ...”

“... it were, the dose of bismuth which makes the position of the intestine apparent on the X-ray screen”,’ we are encouraged to see him as an anxious husband: ‘This image derives, surely, from Vivien’s “intestine” having been diagnosed recently as “so nearly dead”.’ Crawford is probably right about the bismuth, but it’s the wrong kind ...”