“... but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who don’t otherwise watch much football. Observing its rites and rituals sustains the cycle: we all fill in the wallchart and collect the stickers. In this year’s edition in the United States, Canada and Mexico an unprecedented 48 teams will play an unprecedented 104 games, and ...”

“... medicine, the young man was taken from the woods to New York, where for decades his doctor could watch exactly what went on in his stomach when he ate. Some of this is real ‘north face of the Eiger’ stuff. Jesse Lazear let a mosquito bite a yellow-fever victim and then munch on his own arm; the now standard diagnostic heart catheterisation was first done ...”

“... able to see Australia and Antarctica, but nothing worth mentioning of Indo-Malaysia, Asia or the Americas. There is a history which has to be created in this space, and when it is not a history looking back up the lines along which culture has travelled – toward what Maori call Hawaiki paa-mamao, the spirit land high up and distant – it has to be the ...”

“... his hate’ of their father (like so many of his generation, he will shortly leave for the Americas, where ‘a man can be his own master’), she thinks about ‘the magic land … out and away and south’ she can escape to in books. Doing Sunset Song for Higher English, however, the novel too had eyes: the author behind the sinister father, watching ...”