“... of Blake’s visionary portraits – part fraudulent, part inspired. Shadows in a crystal ball. The London Ackroyd, interlocutor for Dickens and Dan Leno, had shifted his critical position from Modernism to heritage curation, clarifying with clear lines all that had previously been ambiguous. Pound, with whom Ackroyd began, was no longer a fashionable ...”

“... But the government is keeping him waiting.‘What can I do?’ asks the governor of Upper Nile, Simon Kun Puoch, a remarkably alert and lively man. Settled in a comfortable cream-coloured leather armchair, in a carefully designed room decorated in white, beige and brown, enhanced by the candy pink of what look like balls of straw stacked up in large ...”

“... Everything else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”

“... rolled from France into a depression over southern England and all but locked into place, like a ball in a cup. When the thick clouds in this air mass burst, they dumped extraordinary intensities of rain. It rained most ferociously on and around the Cotswolds. On Friday afternoon, Pershore, just north of Tewkesbury, was experiencing ten millimetres of rain ...”

“... another such episode. ‘We were all fearing the worst, but Pat managed to catch her like a rugby ball tucked in his chest and he just clung on to her. She had a pink dressing gown on.’ The paper had photographs to accompany the story, purporting to be of ‘Pat’ and the ‘dropped tot’; in fact the man was Oluwaseun Talabi, the man from the 14th floor ...”