“... of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.’ Affinities ...”

“... logical end, appearances ruthlessly penetrated. In Disgrace (1999), he examined the position of white South Africans after apartheid with such unforgiving rigour that many mistook the novel for an argument, and felt compelled to take issue with it (‘South Africa is not only a place of rape,’ Thabo Mbeki remarked). In Youth (2002), the second part of a ...”

“... keeping’. Bishop Wordsworth, great-nephew of the poet, is commemorated by George Frampton in white marble, supine, fingers intertwined as though sleeping off a heavy lunch. He is almost as dead as the supposedly living figures painted by Frampton’s son, Meredith, now in the Tate’s collection. They are minutely detailed simulacra of humans that look ...”

“... over time, it’s important that they don’t change too much while they’re in there. A large white loaf (unsliced) needs to weigh between 750 and 800 grams to be judged comparable to others that have gone before. Jars of peanut butter must be 225-300g (but the container doesn’t have to be a jar). Not any cut flowers, but carnations on the stem. Bras ...”

“... which, astonishingly, transposes and inverts the passage in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that describes the meeting between Hartright and Maria Halcombe – also made ‘ugly’ by facial hair. Edith’s grace is attained only in death: an unexpectedly romantic conclusion with which Kleist would have sympathised. P.J. Kavanagh’s Only by ...”

“... a friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was ...”

“... in 1845, the result of a private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating coal-tar derivatives, aniline in particular. He had also speculated that ...”

“... into chunks of a sensible size – something which very few snakes can manage (an exception is the white-bellied mangrove snake, which twists the legs off crabs for more convenient swallowing). The evolutionary loss of limbs means that the snake’s head cannot afford the heavy bones, teeth and musculature required for this sort of feeding: indeed, the head ...”

“... along with the menace of unregulated nanotechnology, which Gibson was on to long before Michael Crichton and Prince Charles. As his settings have moved closer to the present, though, his plots have mutated from dark conspiracies into Elmore Leonard-ish capers. The tone has become sunnier: fewer good guys are killed off, and the hero usually ends up ...”

“... The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the camps in which the children are described as ...”

“... set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness ...”

“... feel about the placing of such an establishment in this location, has a magical quality … The white dome, which is the outer shell of the containment building that protects the reactor and its steam generator, is about 230 ft (70 metres) high and can be glimpsed from miles around. Pevsner, admirer of Gropius and risk-taker that he was, had no obvious ...”

“... with those in the Jungle at Calais, but their fate certainly prefigures that of the forgotten white working class in the US and Europe. In The Golovlyov Family (1880), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin describes how after the abolition of serfdom a sort of doom hung over the minor gentry as ‘divorced from the stream of life, and without a position of ...”