“... no hints about when we might see the rest. A while back, quizzed by a reporter, she said: ‘May God give me the courage to finish it’ – which is surely a good call, even if you’re not a believer. Last month a journalist friend put the question again, and Dai simply replied: ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know any more than you ...”

“... demands of the uprising that forced Mubarak from power in February 2011. The law expired in May 2012 and although the military regime revived it briefly after the Rabaa massacre, it could not be reinstated permanently because it remained such a powerful symbol of the Mubarak era. Instead the regime devised a new Protest Law, which came into effect on 25 ...”

“... left in the diplomatic tank.’ But what could you do? ‘Iraq was a total basket case.’ That may seem a sweeping assessment, but Blair has probably travelled further, and to more countries, than anyone among his contemporaries. ‘I completely fell in love with Córdoba,’ he records, ‘a beautiful place.’ The Vatican is ‘grand beyond ...”

“... to mean infinite amounts of money to do what you like with over an infinite amount of time. It may be that everything that follows from his getting the grant is a dream – it may be that his getting the award is a dream – but it scarcely matters, since this is a dream he never leaves, and we never see its outside. His ...”

“... blanket statement about Penelope, that ‘no modern reader can find her emotionally plausible,’ may be based on notions of what a right-thinking liberated woman is supposed to feel. As she goes on to document, feminist rewritings and critical studies of Penelope have tried to fill in the gaps that Homer leaves in a character about whom we are supposed to ...”

“... that it would take her 90 minutes to drive to the hospital: would I still be alive then? ‘He may – or may not be. He’s very, very critical.’ They had amputated the toes on my left foot and then, when the leg continued to swell, amputated my leg at the knee. But the poison had already invaded other parts of my ...”

“... the intricacies of world politics’. A few pages later, he writes: ‘At the beginning of May, Osama bin Laden was killed by the Americans in Pakistan. And once again, I personally entered the international newspapers.’ The reference here is to an article on the Arab Spring Thirlwell published in Le Monde last ...”

“... in someone’s mind before it got onto the screen. What we can say is that any place in the world may be both real and imaginary – Proust says we spend far more of our lives in the places that we think of than in the places where we actually are – and that while so many films pretend to show us reality, their authority rests on their showing only what ...”

“... to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. (The convention states that asylum seekers may have to opt for unlawful departure from one country and unlawful entry into another and that this must not prejudice their claim.) But Labor has never been far behind the Coalition. In the 1990s Paul Keating’s administration introduced mandatory detention ...”

“... smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.’ It may be that Macfarlane overestimates how far a linguistic effort can alter habits, which are driven by forces such as the market in computer games, the depersonalising of language which accompanied the new power of the civil service after the Civil War and the ...”

“... the advantage of the person who knows his or her own mind. I think he is wrong about this. Cameron may be making it up as he goes along, but in a speech this can create a sense of open-mindedness. Miliband’s oratory is hard to get into because it is so full of certainty, a series of heartfelt convictions rather than an attempt to engage with the ...”

“... more powerful than the ways natural scientists know physical objects. Radical as this claim may sound today, it goes back at least to the early 18th century, to the principle of ‘the reciprocity of the made and the true’ as formulated by Giambattista Vico: what humans have constructed they can know truly, as opposed to natural things that are the ...”

“... an interest in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of reusable art, and much of London’s Olympic stuff may well end up in Rio in 2016. The biggest building on the site is the media centre, a giant white hangar that will house more than 20,000 accredited journalists. It looks like the Pompidou, with exposed cooling pipes wrapping the building and, inside, a ...”

“... struggle, through an official sequence of dynastic history and philosophers’ names that may have been only fitfully meaningful to them. In 1974, Ma Yang was a ‘peasant’, in the vanguard of the Maoist version of class struggle; now the label describes him as a ‘farmer’, the translation of the same Chinese word favoured by present-day official ...”

“... put forward by the Sharon-Peres government – with the silent endorsement of the Zionist left – may satisfy some Arab regimes, such as those in Egypt and Jordan, they will not be enough for those countries’ civil societies, politicised by radical Islam. The American goal of ‘democratising’ the Middle East – as currently pursued by its troops in Iraq ...”