“... In his history of the genre, Brian Aldiss suggests that most SF is what he calls ‘prodromic’: we must read it less as a prophecy of the future than as symptomatic of the present. By this rule 1984 will be 36 years out of date when we get there. A commoner view (on which Aldiss is naturally not so keen) holds that SF, like the Western, is an exclusively American line of fiction in which dabbling Europeans can easily make fools of themselves ...”

“... illegal aliens’ was to be constructed at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay. ‘We’re going to send them to Guantánamo,’ he said. ‘It’s a tough place to get out.’ The first ten ‘high-threat illegal aliens’ arrived a few days later, in early February. Two hundred or so more followed. But by 13 March, they had all been sent back ...”

“... Sophie Blind, begins the novel dead, or so she tells us: she was decapitated by a car on Avenue George V in Paris, coming out of the hairdresser’s. It’s a comic death and the tone is deadpan. ‘It’s quite certain I am dead. It’s in the newspaper.’ Sophie could get used to her new situation. She spent her life preoccupied with being happy: ‘Now ...”

“... no paltry revelation of lousy morals among the morality-preaching classes. It was, at least until we learned of the Iran-Contra business, the most systematic attempt to convert the United States from a democratic republic into a junta with a civilian façade. Since it takes the part for the whole, and summarises the whole tapestry by the single thread by ...”

“... understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the middle. They are coming home from their bases in Germany, too. The many car parks’ worth of mine-proof vehicles you can see from Battlesbury ...”

“... 12th-century exchequer. Next, after four centuries of inflation – job-title inflation anyway – we find the post of treasurer ennobled as lord treasurer or puffed up as far as lord high treasurer. In the 17th century, the office was put into commission, first in an ad hoc way and then permanently. Thus heroic social-climbing was succeeded by backstairs ...”

“... discovered the shattered, melted wreckage resting on and around a vast termite mound in the bush, there was only one survivor: the American chief security officer and Korean War veteran, Sergeant Harold Julian. The remaining crew and passengers on the Albertina perished in the fireball that consumed the DC-6 when it hit the ground and broke ...”

“... blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now is a subject that engages semioticians, social historians, political analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar designers, magazine editors, high-spending ...”

“... to rouse moral indignation by means of sensationalism. Needless to say, it does not touch on how we might alleviate the situation of those whose misfortunes it describes, still less on why they, among all the unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help. Certainly no English man or woman would wish to be a German Jew in Germany ...”

“... that when the army reached the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, there would be another photo op, and we would be told that the complex had been secured. By 8 April, the US army was reported to have reached the Ministry of Information, two streets away from the museum. I emailed Pentagon staff, reminding them of the importance of the museum. In reply, they asked ...”

“... It has taken the entire century to bring Freud to the judgment of history. Whatever shall we do about Jung? His beginnings were not promising and his father frankly worried about him. Dominated by a mother at once unreliable and eerily intimate, the child was an asocial miscreant, rejected by his peers. Home was no better – the atmosphere was ‘unbreathable’ – and when he could not escape to the countryside the boy began to explore his own interior ...”

“... terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.’   Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it all mean? The ...”

“... of a new map for Israel, Diaspora Jews of all denominations are always unsure of their ground: if we choose not to live there, do we have a particular right to confront, head-on, those who do? Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Relations recognised the inevitability of this tension: following Sacks’s letter, he acknowledged ...”

“... of a first meeting with a member of a previously unencountered tribe, a birder fresh from the bush. My most memorable youthful twitch was in the autumn of 1975. I was 14. At Breydon Water in Norfolk a greater yellowlegs had been found, a very rare North American wader, like an attenuated redshank, with thin straw-yellow legs, a delicate long bill and ...”

“... with his own on the question of possible military action in Iraq. Before looking at his reasons, we need to consider the case of a Foreign Office official who did resign over Iraq. In a memo dated 18 March 2003 Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, who had been in the diplomatic service for 29 years, told her superiors that using ...”