“... Of Haddon-Riddoch the publishers say only that he ‘started’ as a trap collector, of whom there may be more than we would think. An earlier, slimmer version of his book appeared in 2001. Its title is not the least of its oddities; it is as if the public hangman had published a rundown on drops and nooses called ‘Urban Reveries’. Fundamentally, it is a ...”

“... to make the problem vanish, and conscious, on the other, that little good and much unpleasantness may come of its being found out. Such vanishing acts require, in the painter’s estimation, ‘a bit too much irony’. A surprising choice of words, perhaps, though irony and sentimentalism depend on the dissonance between manner and matter, and they have a way ...”

“... book, you will get three full pages (approx. 1000 words) to say exactly what you like. Litt may use the conventions of chick lit, but Finding Myself is not arranged like a trashy novel. Presented as Victoria’s manuscript, it has a dizzying construction – notes towards a work of fiction rather than the work itself. An early draft, it comes with ...”

“... highly cinematic adventure story of daring and survival, told from the perspective of Snowman, who may be the last surviving human being after a virus has destroyed the population of a futuristic biotech world. Wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, wrapped in a sheet against the cruel sun, scavenging for food and sleeping in a tree to escape lab-bred animal ...”

“... and many ingenious devices. Some of these – like filling a fifth of the book with pictures – may strike purists as cheating. But couching each chapter as a literary essay is definitely a good idea, since quotation, especially of poetry, takes up a lot of space. So do capsule biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging ...”

“... Secretary, Mr Donald ‘Rummy’ Rumsfeld, has just warned us that wearing down the Iraqi Army may take some time. Why does no one listen to him? Like most other politicians, he can, unexpectedly, utter a (belated) truth. George Bush has asked the Congress to stump up an extra $75 billion to replenish expended hardware and to transport more soldiery from ...”

“... that The Shock of the Fall is ‘so good it will make you feel a better person’, though that may be the last thing anyone should ask of a novel. The narrator, Matthew Homes, is 19 years old. He lives in Bristol. When he was nine, his older brother, Simon, who had Down’s syndrome, died during a family holiday at a caravan park on the Dorset coast. The ...”

“... was the vicar of Ludgvan in Penwith. At 52 he felt ‘his energies starting to dim’ but then, in May 1748, he ‘happened to bump into two distinguished antiquarians’ – also parsons, needless to say – and what he told them about local antiquities so amazed them that he was encouraged to set off on a renewed career of walking, collecting, describing and ...”

“... aftermath of September 11 – just manages to stir, spookily, with its own grey form-life. It may be true that cuteness looms a lot of the time as an Orozco temptation. The Foucault pendulum billiard table is cute, and so are the pairs of yellow motorbikes snapped in the city, and the axiometric two-wheelers. I couldn’t give a toss for the squeezed ...”

“... agenda? Do you still do candles for your birthday?’ Some of the questions, then, may be straightforwardly answered, but many don’t really allow for articulated response: they urge reflection, invite imaginative excursions or set up covert statements, permitting simply agreement or dissent. This is not (for the most part) what could be ...”

“... among the hundreds of functionaries – more famous than the others, admittedly, though his clerk may exaggerate his fame – who work at and for the Agency, the only force of law and order in the city. What’s more, as often as not he solves his cases incorrectly. Sivart does at least talk like a textbook hard-boiled detective – or rather he writes like ...”

“... of manslaughter is next on the programme.’ These elaborate designs and the reference to them may seem gratuitous, but of course that appearance is precisely the point, the vivid, continuing collaboration of randomness and intricate order. As Hitchcock told Truffaut with a fine sense of double thinking: ‘Even a gratuitous scene must have some ...”

“... be loveable in the absence of almost all the old favourites that have made them so. The effect may be a bit like going to a concert by the Stones or the Who and being offered only stuff from their latest album. The limitations of the Academy’s collection, including as it does the only landscapes by the Big Three that could be described in some degree as ...”

“... in 1986 he set out his position: ‘He is very difficult to stage (light – position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.’ Necessary but dispensable, the sort of paradox that can be richly productive in literature, but translates into the world of ...”

“... reach and dissipate more easily from the edges; and in some tree species a range of leaf shapes may be found on different parts of the plant, according to their exposure to the sun (and hence, incidentally, the size of fossil leaves can sometimes be a useful clue to past climates). A covering of fine hairs can control temperature too, reducing the amount of ...”