“... might replace the lumpen profile of Canada Square and its tower hard by, in the basements of which may be found a mean and dispiriting shopping centre – an object lesson in how not to build underground public space. North Greenwich and Canada Water, cheaper comrades in gigantism, cannot match the assurance of Canary Wharf. Both opt for mosaic cladding, a ...”

“... the means that I use for this. My business is a holy one, and holy things, so an old sage teaches, may be shown only to holy people. But I regard as holy a weak human being who strives for a lofty goal. His research into Menschenkenntnis, or the ‘understanding of human nature’, built directly on Herder’s search for the nature of humanity, on ...”

“... should place a priority on relocating Siberia’s youth,’ Hill and Gaddy declare. ‘While it may seem harsh, the challenge of maintaining the stranded elderly population of Siberia is something of a finite proposition.’ Well, it does seem harsh. To subsidise the young to flee Siberia, leaving their parents and grandparents behind to die off in the land ...”

“... psychopaths . . . The comfort is that you are all serving the same cause in the end, and the time may come one day when you may be able to cross over and join Kandapalli’s people.’ Willie spends seven years among the psychopaths. He lives a boring, occasionally violent and, above all, pointless life. The guerrillas ...”

“... was no harm intended. It was simply an entertainment for him.’ Quite. Squat-necked Scot Erdal may have been, but she was not, she makes it clear, one of his girls. She was outside the gaggle of squealing debutantes, an amanuensis not part of an entourage, employed for her skills and brains as a copy editor and to commission Russian books for ...”

“... A male rat will continue mating with a female rat even if she’s dead. A ‘dominant male rat may mate with up to twenty female rats in just six hours,’ Sullivan says. Male rats exiled from their nest by more aggressive male rats will also live in all-male rat colonies and have sex with the other male rats. The gestation period of a pregnant female rat ...”

“... subtitle, ‘The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’, appears only on the title page). This may make sense from the point of view of publicity and sales – Eggers’s name sells books, and selling more books raises awareness of and more funds for the causes that matter most to Achak – but it also inspires unease: Achak ...”

“... self-loathing. Yet even here there is a strange play between the Promethean and the Orphic. There may be a physicist’s response to the wonder (or dread) of existence, and I do not mean the much touted idea of a Big Bang when everything came into being. The closest to nothingness that can be imagined is a vacuum at zero degrees Kelvin. In classical ...”

“... editors. It’s not enough to prevent Count Ciano going to Germany to sign the Pact of Steel on 22 May 1939. Weisz flies back to Berlin to cover the event for Reuters, finding time for more great sex with Christa (‘“God,” she said, “how I love this.” He could tell that she did’) and failing once again to persuade her to leave with him. Back in ...”

“... pay no taxes or royalties and use sweated labour, they can face down legitimate competitors, who may be forced to enter into partnerships with them. True, this is not unprecedented, but the forms are new, and there are more places of refuge and more corrupt officials and bent businessmen to make it all work. Third, while part of this illicit trade takes the ...”

“... and loggers, and it is pathetically clear that their luck is finally running out. The MacDonalds may have won at Quebec, but the moment of their fall was merely postponed. In the little red boy’s narrative MacLeod has written a restrained lament for the slow extinction of a community with its tribal eccentricities, shibboleths and inherited quirks of ...”

“... on to share them with others, which meant that multiple copies were slopping around Washington: in May 1941 the Nazis warned Tokyo that their codes were being broken. Had Tokyo not insisted – absurdly – that its codes were unbreakable, this would have cost the Allies dear. Henry Wallace, the Vice-President, was an even greater liability, happily confiding ...”

“... her companions? For starters, it involves a Walter Cronkite surrogate. The time is ‘Sunday, 25 May 1539’. The place is Tampa Bay on the Gulf of Florida. In my mind, I can hear the narrator: ‘What kind of a day was it? A day like all days . . .’ ‘We barely see,’ Richter writes, ‘the sails of nine Spanish ships anchored three miles or so off the ...”

“... have never attended on their rucksacks. His slightly lofty disappointment sighs from the pages. He may overstate Chile’s transformation by Pinochet, as he may exaggerate the country’s earlier appetite for Allende. This is after all a memoir and polemic, not much more than perceptive diary entries really, linked by short ...”

“... Bolster, ‘a passion which would transform her life and stir the deepest part of her being’. In May 1835, they ran away to Switzerland. After five weeks of ‘elevation’ in the Alps, they descended to Geneva, where she felt ‘like a carp on a lawn’. Her new career had begun. Ostracised by the society that idolised her lover, she wrote pugnacious ...”