“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... buffalo, eland, impala, leopard, lion, warthog and waterbuck. Handy information, too, that ‘white rhino are sometimes allocated for culling by the Natal Parks Board’ and that in South Africa ‘trophy fees are only charged for animals bagged or “wounded and lost”.’ The politics of the guide’s author and intended readers is indicated in the ...”

“... Seabrook says, as Kosoville). Walking with Seabrook along the shore at Margate, subjected to the white noise of puns, submerged quotations, barks of self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into ...”

“... played basketball, which made him different from his predecessors. Rhodes is a 5’ 7” balding white man, a worrier and a workaholic who tries to unwind with a drink and a cigarette – a natural fit for golf, in other words. But he was drawn to the basketball player. For eight years Rhodes worked as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and his chief ...”

“... were not auspicious, and we were concerned from the outset that our composition – all white, almost all male, almost all lawyers and London-based – would undermine our ability to speak with any legitimacy. The Conservatives had come into government committed to tearing up the Human Rights Act, an early product of the previous Labour government ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... The best book I know on the relationship between sporting culture and success is Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s account of the 2002 Oakland A’s baseball team.† The argument is compellingly simple: sports teams are run like gentlemen’s clubs rather than businesses, and clubs don’t base their business decisions on facts but on codes and ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... fifty of them are of the letter ‘i’, each in different handwriting in shades of grey on a white background; the other fifty, similarly presented, are of ‘j’s. If each image is 32 pixels high and 32 pixels wide, it can be represented as a single point in a 1024-dimensional space (322 = 1024), where each dimension corresponds to a pixel, and the ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the coup ...”

“... places, in each other’s presence. That is the impression one gets from such excellent poems as Michael Longley’s ‘The Linen Workers’ and Derek Mahon’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. In 1962, in The New Poetry, there were poems of similar kind and distinction, such as ‘A Peasant’, by R.S. Thomas, and Iain Crichton-Smith’s ‘Old Woman’. All four ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...”

“... caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s White House was run to astrological time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...”