“... lack of evidence, so they have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ordinary city sounds in Steep, but also no thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft guns. No clattering crash of a nearby explosion. No wailing chorus of sirens, no choking clouds of dust, no corpses ...”

“... the Invisible Man and the woman serving took no notice, just saying: ‘Well, it’s a bit better day.’ I ask him how he got rid of it and he says it went soon after he met Terry, his wife, so that he attributed it to the stresses of being young (and, I imagine, with eczema, unloved) and living in a bedsit with all the hardships of his young life. While he ...”

“... that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the ...”

“... at the yard,With a running fire of stock-whips and a fiery run of hoofs:Oh! The hardest day was never then too hard!Throughout Hornung’s fiction, Australia recurs as the land of freedom where a man can make what he likes of himself. Raffles is a development of his first dark hero, Stingaree, the bushranger who sports a monocle and who robs banks ...”

“... the unlikeliest end any empire ever had – went off without a visible hitch. Almost every day of his five-year term, Patten did battle, as he saw it, on Hong Kong’s behalf. Towards the end he was all but alone, shunned by those he had, as he saw it, tried to protect, on the issue he thought most important: democracy. When he arrived, Hong Kong had a ...”

“... car, Cash was a hybrid, made up of many parts: he appeared in films (A Gunfight, 1970, with Kirk Douglas); he played in prisons (first performing inside in 1957); he campaigned on behalf of Native Americans, and against the Ku Klux Klan; he opposed the Vietnam War; and in 1973 he released an album, Gospel Road, the soundtrack to a self-financed film based on ...”

“... cleansing (‘transfer’) of the Palestinians across the Jordan; and in 1996 Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (now a senior official at the Pentagon) advised Binyamin Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Peace Process and return to military repression of the Palestinians. It’s far more probable, therefore, that most members of the Bush and Sharon Administrations ...”

“... and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The ...”

“... 20th-century non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century ...”

“... it is rare for a provincial disaster to create a national emergency. And on that particular day, the country’s attention was fixed on the polling booths, where a referendum was being held to support or reject the new Constitution. Everyone knew there would be a majority for the ‘yes’ campaign, which was led by the popular and charismatic Hugo ...”

“... on a political career when he watched the movie The American President, which stars Michael Douglas as a widowed president who falls in love with a lobbyist. Apparently, the film helped Edwards to imagine ‘a life of purpose following a great personal loss’. (Incidentally, it also means that two of the three main Democrat contenders for the ...”

“... Public disillusion has reached such depths that no one now cares whether or not Stephen Dorrell or Douglas Hogg and their junior colleagues are telling the truth. They probably are at the moment, or at least the truth as they presently believe it to be. The reason the beef industry has collapsed is not that people think they are being lied to but that no one ...”

“... with Iraq followed in the 1990s, when Saddam Hussein gave Syria 150,000 barrels of free oil every day and allowed Syrian businesses to sell Iraqis about $1 billion worth of goods. When the US assumed control of the Iraqi side of the frontier in April, the oil and the trade stopped. Syria’s economy was in trouble. ‘By 2010,’ says Nabil Sukkar, an ...”

“... of myth and set about dismantling it and mocking it. Thus the Odyssey was reduced in Ulysses to a day’s perambulations in a half-baked city, its hero Bloom made, in a feat of genius, both anti-heroic and oddly heroic at the same time, both small in his gestures and circumstances and oddly large in the quality of what he notices and remembers, his ...”

“... in the downtown county jail. His offence was not wholly clear. The trouble began the previous day while he’d been in an overflow room at the state capitol listening in as a senate committee debated a bill to crack down on undocumented migrants. The gist of the bill was to make life impossible for anyone in Arizona without papers: impossible to drive a ...”