“... Clancy fired the agent who had represented him for 15 years and hired a ‘business manager’, Michael Ovitz, who, he hoped, would market his technothrillers more lucratively in Hollywood. Most of what has happened to the book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... to lose his seat. Now, Bill Rammell, the intrepid minister for higher education, has picked up the black spot that fell from Collins’s hand. He has set up a review which is apparently likely to recommend that citizenship classes should deal with the ‘core British values’ of democracy, freedom of speech, fairness and responsibility, and how they have ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”

“... charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, told the Commons more candidly: ‘One must realise that the 600-year-old statute is couched in such archaic language that it would be difficult to prove all the necessary ingredients of the crime and for a modern jury to come to grips with the ...”

“... the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ Lincoln was a Republican, of course, but John Kerry’s journey has been a very modern one for a Democrat, a journey around every aspect of himself and every issue pressing in America, cutting and rounding and paring away as he goes, making jigsaw ...”

“... and the value on the dimension ranges from 0, which represents white, to 255, which represents black. The data for the set of images is completely represented as a hundred points in this 1024D space. A support vector machine could attempt to find a hyperplane that divides the space so that, ideally, all the points corresponding to the images of ‘i’s ...”

“... the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the ...”

“... discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested seven times and his home bombed, that black students in Montgomery, Alabama had been expelled after singing ‘My country, ’tis of thee’ on the steps of the State capitol. The advertisement named no names among the forces it criticised. But a commissioner of the city of ...”

“... crime, ‘flexible’ on defence and foreign policy, solid for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus ...”

“... came out of the school gates slugging from plastic bottles of pop – orange or green or black or blue – ignoring the rain, the cars and the time, attending only to each other. Some of the flags were torn by the wind. The Irish ones were tied to lamp-posts on the road to Market Street. Union Jacks and Red Hands of Ulster were up on Russell ...”

“... Bette Bourne didn’t disappoint, although no screen was necessary. (S)he had brought along a black bin-bag of oddments, which (s)he emptied onto the floor, picking through the motley treasures between sips from a mug whose tawny contents may have been cold tea without milk. (S)he: I have no idea whether this compromised pronoun represents sensitivity or ...”

“... America was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s ...”