“... Here, with the cloud of a six-figure advance trailing behind her, comes Arundhati Roy: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jack-fruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air ...”

“... bores imaginable, but they stick to being bores through thick and thin. Under Western eyes they may be lovably picturesque and Russian, but to many Russians – women especially – they remain bores, and all too familiar. Yerofeev’s combination of art and erudition generates comedy not by diverting boredom but by encouraging it. Alcohol is its own ...”

“... minor feature’ of his ancestral landscape. But there are some things he will not do. Soft woods may be the current money-spinner elsewhere, but this is Dorset and, as he says firmly, there will be acres of spruce only ‘over my dead body’. Redundant barns and cottages can be sold off profitably enough, but a more concerted participation in the rising ...”

“... to exploit a weak India on terms of privileged access denied to her competitors, although that may have been the case. The fact that the generalised requirement for the defence of India was translated into specific territorial objectives by soldiers and sailors, Foreign Office officials and cabinets, rather than by Lancashire cotton men or City ...”

“... than to invest in arming their own ships. The failure of the Japanese to build up an armed navy may have been influenced by their abortive invasion of Korea in the 1590s. Their fleet was defeated by Admiral Yi, who deployed ‘turtle ships’ entirely encased in metal plates. Professor Parker is at pains to make it clear that his book deals with ...”

“... puzzling and surmise; it teases the brain. For example, a reader of Life: A User’s Manual may notice a certain similarity in the names Verne, Cinoc and Perec, and may even link them by means of a word-chain, a type of puzzle expounded in Chapter 85. Can Perec’s outspoken interest in Verne be attributed to their ...”

“... Jevons, wrote in The Theory of Political Economy: ‘The susceptibility [to pleasure] of one mind may, for what we know, be a thousand times greater than that of another. But, provided that the susceptibility was different in a like ratio in all directions, we should never be able to discover the difference. Every mind is thus inscrutable to every other ...”

“... of sticking pins into dolls and burning toenails. The ‘irrationality’ of Dionysiac cult may have a certain Nietzschean panache: burying a spell on a lead tablet in order to strike a group of doctors with unemployment is a more embarrassing (self-) image. The erotic spells can be vivid: I bind you, Theodotis daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake ...”

“... spotted the resemblance. George Eliot’s reply is defensive: ‘for any annoyance, even though it may have been brief and not well-founded, which the appearance of the story may have caused Mr Gwyther, the writer is sincerely sorry.’ Later, a more sophisticated method of assimilating known material helped her to avoid ...”

“... a serious mistake, as some of the volunteers returned home to lead an Uighur insurgency. China may have trained as many as 55,000 Muslim volunteers, Uighur and non-Uighur. Soviet officials claimed their training was paid for the by the CIA at a cost of $400 million, an estimate Cooley thinks cannot be far from the mark. Margaret Thatcher rivalled Ronald ...”

“... everything can be prearranged: as I write, it appears that for no reason at all McCain and Bradley may win the New Hampshire primaries of their respective parties. I tend to believe that voters are reporting this preference just to screw things up or make them a tad more interesting. No one can explain why the American Presidential system should be so much ...”

“... loss: ‘I have never built a ship; draw a design of it on the ground, that, seeing the design, I may build a ship.’ Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah of the Epic of Gilgamesh, also has to receive detailed information from Ea on the construction of his ship. Noah is the only shipbuilder in the Bible, and he, too, gets divine instruction: ‘Make thee an ark ...”

“... a loner, a watcher, a man obsessed with mechanical power, should become addicted to such fantasies may come as no surprise. But what about his wife? In all the first-hand accounts, Rosemary West comes as close as anyone can to being the traditional, almost fairy-tale ‘monster’: a brutal mother (and stepmother), she beats her children on a daily basis; she ...”

“... left him determined never to be out-trumped in cynicism. Trite and silly as political correctness may sometimes be, it takes someone like Wyatt to bring home the mindlessness of knee-jerk incorrectness. When Elspeth Howe complained about the women having to withdraw after dinner at Cavendish Avenue, Wyatt explained that ‘it was sensible that the women ...”

“... nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that Jerry, a Newbury road-protester, planned a firebombing campaign. I know Jerry. He was the victim not the perpetrator of just such an attack: six months before the article was published, his bus was firebombed as he slept on board with ...”