“... three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks. One hundred and thirty ...”

“... spaces, its cathedral acoustic. If The Waves is somewhere in the background of Orbital, it may be as warning rather than model. It showed how easily lyricism can get clogged, with details becoming indistinguishable from abstractions, losing the power to animate a fiction. Harvey keeps things crisp and contained, her researched details (the way ...”

“... and beaten in the process. (The events at Columbia helped to inspire the uprisings in France in May 1968.) Early in June, Kennedy, whose ability to tap into the civil rights movement might have enabled him to translate anti-war activism into electoral appeal, was assassinated by a Palestinian man who claimed he had acted out of anger at Kennedy’s support ...”

“... it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ...”

“... epochal shift, marked by brutality, regime change and massive enforced population movement. On 6 May 1527 the Spanish, German and Italian troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, sacked the city, assaulting and slaughtering its citizens, pillaging and violating sacred spaces and objects. The level of violence reported in eyewitness accounts ...”

“... policy efforts to marketise by design.The second story about universities is the one that may be more familiar to those who have looked on from a distance. Across the Western world in the 1960s, campuses were crucibles of politicisation and left-wing organisation, shaping the ‘new social movements’ that followed in subsequent decades. But a ...”

“... precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes. He was 34 when, in May 1914, he stood up to speak at the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society. Everyone was looking in the wrong place, he said. The cause of the conditions was not a germ or genetic defect, but something missing. Not an agent, but an absence.Touch​ your neck, just above ...”

“... would not have been welcome even if he had delivered it on time, in person and in sobriety, and may have been devised to sting the austere, abstemious Liliane.On one gala occasion Ramón and Liliane failed their children simultaneously. At the Comédie-Française on 16 April 1942, during the interval of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, Dominique was looking ...”

“... but certain, in Godfrey-Smith’s view, that octopuses have rich subjective experience. But they may have even more than this. According to some theorists, notably Stanislas Dehaene, a particular kind of mental processing, the sort that involves completing novel tasks extended over time, not only goes hand in hand with human consciousness, but helps explain ...”

“... social spectrum while maintaining one’s own status and dignity. ‘The definition of Civility may be thus understood,’ one 17th-century commentator wrote: ‘it is a science for the right understanding [of] our selves, and true instructing how to dispose all our words and actions in their proper and due places.’ It would ‘conciliate and procure the ...”

“... learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the ...”

“... side. My father advised caution: ‘Best not to have too many illusions; the anti-imperialists may not have been as solid as you think.’ Both my mother and my father broke politically with the family, and became communists. My father was very active in the party, which delayed their wedding a bit. My grandfather refused to allow her to marry a communist ...”

“... did about his job, it was one he enjoyed and which he did exceptionally well. The students may have been intimidated by him but he was popular with his staff and particularly with the women. Mary Judd, the librarian at the issue desk at Hull, thought that ‘most women liked him more than most men because he could talk to a woman and make her feel ...”

“... matter of vocabulary and of languages; even in his grammatical address, Stevens is unique. A poem may be argumentative or instructive or strictly imaginary, but it comes couched in the interrogative or the imperative. Even the punctuation is picturesque. When is the reader ever hectored or harangued the way he is by Stevens? Perhaps only as a child by some ...”

“... in the sense of what it means to be a Catholic: so this has to be addressed, however much we may feel – in Muriel Spark’s case, anyway – that the field has already been ploughed pretty thoroughly. Perhaps another way of approaching Spark’s fiction would be to consider the distinction between those novels which are written around a ...”