“... response. There seems to be less porn, or as wags dub it ‘pr0n’, than there once was – which may reflect the fact that there is now so much free pr0n on the internet that fewer mugs will pay for it.) Gates’s prediction was not just wrong, it is steadily getting wronger, as rates of spam have gone up sharply in the last few months. If you have the ...”

“... Haw first set up camp there in June 2001 in protest against economic sanctions imposed on Iraq. In May 2006 the police removed the lot: banners, slogans, posters, cards, photographs of deformed babies, cartoons of Blair, Brown and Bush, the parliamentary voting records of MPs, grubby teddy bears and toys (as well as the plastic sheets and cans that constituted ...”

“... he writes about) is presumably not unconnected to an anxiety that typewriting is a bit girly: I may be sitting at a typewriter, but that doesn’t make me a typist; oho, no – I’m a writer. It’s just possible that a similar anxiety informed my own disquiet at the babysitter’s co-opting of the typewriter in my bedroom. Did she perhaps imagine that it ...”

“... and falling back out of space like a huge breeze block, are inherently dangerous things to do. It may be that in time the shuttle’s failure rate – one crash for every 50 flights – will come not to seem, by the harsh standards of manned space exploration, outlandishly high. Nasa might do well to stress this riskiness, instead of acting all ...”

“... winner of the Whitbread Book Awards, which take place later this month. The reception and dinner may still be held at the Brewery in Chiswell Street, the site Samuel Whitbread opened in 1750, but Whitbread plc has changed: the chairman’s annual report puffs the fact that ‘the last year has seen a transformation.’ The ‘UK’s leading leisure ...”

“... was born in Sicily around 1430 and died there in 1479. He seems to have been trained in Naples. He may have travelled in northern Europe and he certainly worked in Venice in the 1470s. It is not clear just where, and from whom, he learned to paint in the manner of Jan van Eyck, using oil paint laid on in transparent layers which give a depth and brilliance ...”

“... among the circles, picnic, dance, play instruments and celebrate ‘as many of our ancestors may have done for thousands of years’. The Megalithic Portal website’s vagueness is justified. Nobody knows what rituals Stonehenge was built for, and the celebrations in their present form date back a mere seven years to a House of Lords ruling under the ...”

“... and wrote: ‘I am extending the detention of the defendant; but I feel uneasy about it as it may concern an innocent man.’ After this intervention the judge decided to extend the detention for only 18 days, rather than the 22 requested. The defendant remains in an Israeli prison still not knowing what he is accused of or when he will be released. His ...”

“... the assault ‘hubristic’; the Daily Mail and Sunday Times put it down to envy. All of which may be right, but that doesn’t mean that Fischer is necessarily wrong. The reaction to his piece suggests that the norm is a complacent atmosphere of mutual congratulation,* as novelists tread warily around each other on the interminable circuit of ...”

“... appealing only to blacks), and Hillary, drawing an unspoken parallel, declaring that King may have been a great orator, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights legislation passed. Certainly there are those who voted and will vote for or against Obama because of his race, but horizontal racism has largely disappeared in the US. These days, a ...”

“... don’t reveal the amount actually available for borrowing at the lowest quoted rate, and it may fall short of ‘reasonable market size’. It could range from a mere $50 million or so to a yard or more (‘yard’ – originally an abbreviation of ‘milliard’ – is the money-market term for billion, a word that in a noisy environment is all too ...”

“... research unit predicts that this year China will grow by only 5 per cent, and others argue that it may already have fallen into recession. Twenty million migrant workers have lost their jobs since the beginning of the crisis, and more than 60,000 factories have closed over the past year, as orders from Western companies have plummeted and foreign investment ...”

“... to revolt or flee. As Delany surmises, Gissing’s tendency to read life through literature may also have contributed to his early belief that Nell was fundamentally a good woman who could be redeemed (Delany suggests the influence of Rossetti’s poem ‘Jenny’, though other Victorian prostitute figures like Nancy in Oliver Twist also come to ...”

“... mentality that has always been more or less racist, and traditions of tributary statecraft that may have been conducive to stability, but were always based on hierarchy and inequality. Might this heritage compromise the fair prospect of a democratic inter-state system? Not necessarily, since while ‘the Western world is over, the new world, at least for ...”

“... speak, because in satisfying our need for justice, say (this is one of his recurring examples), we may have to sacrifice our desire for mercy. He wants us to get used to self-betrayal as integral to the moral life and not alien to it, built in to choice making. Sometimes he can be blithe about all this – ‘I adore having relations with the enemy and ...”