“... Responsible access is a modest demand, but the forces of landed resistance are formidable. In May, the shadow environment minister, Alex Sobel, pledged to introduce a right to roam in England, only to U-turn in October after pressure from rural landowners. It isn’t easy to redefine the terms of private property in the country that pioneered ...”

“... AI researchers of the last thirty years, is a comparatively recent convert to AI doomerism. Until May last year Hinton was, at 75, an active researcher in Google’s AI division. Observing the progress being made, he concluded that, to his surprise, existing algorithms were already better at learning than human brains, and that superhuman levels of ...”

“... a cordon sanitaire was thrown around Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province. Hubei may not have been a familiar name to many people outside China. But it is squarely on the map of global investors: 9 per cent of China’s car industry – the largest in the world – is located there. While health experts struggled to get politicians to take ...”

“... and falling into water so cold it left him numb for hours. The overall effect, Dallek suggests, may have been to compromise his immune system, rendering him more susceptible to the polio virus. Polio rarely had serious consequences for adults, but it devastated FDR. Eleanor, who had discovered Franklin’s affair with her social secretary Lucy ...”

“... home town, Sarajevo: like Hemon himself, who was due to fly home from a trip to the States on 1 May 1992, the day before the Bosnian Serbs completed their blockade. Brik is a writer too, who earns nothing and is grimly uncomfortable in his American Dream marriage to a brain surgeon who makes all their money. So he applies for a grant to research the 1908 ...”

“... was America. ‘It’s true there are some misguided boys,’ the principal said, ‘and they may be the ones threatening us, but it is America that has bombed their homes.’ The list of grievances against America is long: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the civilian death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly in Pakistan itself. I am writing this in ...”

“... more vital to the US than oil, even if the word itself is scrupulously avoided. The Bush Doctrine may not have been given an official funeral, but Washington is now making it clear that it is willing to coexist with the Islamic Republic – so long as it does not actively threaten America’s vital interests by trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran is not a ...”

“... by Apollo 11’s commander). Apollo 11’s commander, Neil Armstrong, took saying less to what we may as well call cosmic extremes. He went silent, became absent, allegedly working but never seen, the J.D. Salinger of the US space programme. The race for the Moon was fuelled by a terrifying combustion of scientific know-how and political paranoia. But the ...”

“... on the Massachusetts authorities to give the men a new trial. But, Temkin suggests, the pressure may have backfired: US officials didn’t want to be seen to change their minds in response to foreign criticism. They bristled at interference even from Americans who did not live in Massachusetts; foreign advice was still more unwelcome. In 1930, former ...”

“... of porn that the non-pornographic bits should be as tedious and dilatory as possible, which may be one explanation for the dyers’ disputes in Birdsong, but this means that in satisfying his readers’ requirements sooner Faulks is doing them a disservice by not giving them what they don’t want. Perhaps it’s because he has the hope of moving on to ...”

“... the story of ‘old cities’ in the region. It seems his goal is at last in sight, and on 20 May, as they prepare to leave Bakairí, he writes to Nina that he expects ‘to be in touch with the old civilisation within a month’, and to be at the ‘main object’ – in other words, Z – by August. Fawcett’s last despatch, written on 29 ...”

“... and principle in their working lives when faced with destructive herd instincts. Politicians may be confused about what they mean by the personal responsibility the state expects from the population at large, but we the people are in a similar fog about the responsibility we might expect of our elected representatives. Responsibility has a ...”

“... vigorous exercise of hard power to prolong the postwar Pax Americana. In ways that Obama himself may only dimly appreciate, his decision on Afghanistan affirms the pre-existing character of US foreign policy. But by advocating ‘counter-insurgency’, the McChrystal report also represents a tacit acknowledgment that a decades-long military reform project ...”

“... one thing: it is less defensible when you do it on behalf of your progeny, something Alibhai-Brown may be aware of when she expresses the wish that one day both TL and the ‘beloved son’ will write their own versions of the story which ‘will contradict mine on every point’. (I have to say that I hope they don’t: I already know enough of this ...”

“... cakes (and not above stealing and swindling to buy them), not academically gifted. Baker thinks he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended ...”