“... Afterwards she resolved to accept her addiction and shed her old identity; she dyed her hair white-blonde, became Anna Kavan, a name which seemed fortuitously reminiscent of Kafka. ‘Why does the K sound in a name symbolise the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?’ she wrote. Asylum Piece, her first book ...”

“... scandal, but it was acting in the national interest. Johnson’s real hero, however, is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s ...”

“... thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête noire, Richard Owen, held fast to Platonisin, however, and denied that they were intermediate to anything – he placed the platypus with the edentates (armadillos, again). Owen even denied that Ornithorychus laid eggs, though British settlers and Aborigines said they ...”

“... mother’s dress that evening as ill-fitting and embarrassing: ‘narrow bodice’, ‘fold-over white satin boat neck’, ‘lots of bare skin’. The party is full of Katherine’s cronies, minor celebrities with a certain shabby glamour, all harbouring minor grudges. The next morning there is broken glass on the floor, which the maid cleans up ...”

“... but easily visible. The algae disappear and so do the bright colours, leaving the coral ghostly white – what’s known as coral bleaching. If the corals can’t regain their algae, they starve and die.A recent assessment of climate tipping points in Science designated low-latitude coral reefs one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to rising ...”

“... teeter between the two: a dead bee goes round and round in the coffee the boy has stirred; a white slug is frozen on a wall; a black carafe of wine stands on the table ‘like an axis’ around which the grown-ups are laughing and talking. Repetition and variation have their narrative counterpart, too – and The Question of Bruno isn’t so much a ...”

“... The description of what we might call Pan prior, ‘the first chimpanzee’, is from an essay by Richard Wrangham in Tree of Origin. Like The Ape and the Sushi Master, Tree of Origin proposes that we (human beings) share with our near primate cousins some of the behaviour we like best in ourselves. Professional primate-watchers are usually wary of venturing ...”

“... identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare International Airport. Slahi was broken. After medical treatment and ...”

“... The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next to an attractive blonde in a beret and white raincoat, whom he manages to ignore completely as he struggles to stay upright while unfurling his newspaper. She doesn’t quite return the lack of compliment. His antics amuse her, evidently, but there’s a hint of pleasurable speculation in her ...”

“... to catch some telltale sign of intelligence chiming in at the special frequency. He heard mostly white noise; one heart-thumping squawk, he later realised, came not from the sky but from a top-secret military installation nearby. Not easily discouraged, he attracted colleagues to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes ...”

“... thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. For Pater, physical lust and spiritual ambition are opposites. The other exception is Kate Moss. Consider ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... language in which it is expressed had changed. You need to go back to contemporary texts, as Peter White did in his excellent Promised Verse (1993). The exact relationship of Horace, Maecenas and Augustus is quite tricky enough without having to read the details through a distorting lens. It might be worth adding that what are normally called the Odes and ...”

“... into a tailspin by announcing an increase in military spending of 17.7 per cent. A Beijing defence white paper published last October had already identified the United States as the main enemy because of its ‘new gunboat policy and neo-economic colonialism’. The near-unbelievable decision to press ahead with an American ‘missile shield’ has only ...”

“... Fay Weldon’s autobiography. Early on, angels appear to her mother in the local park; a woman in white sits on the six-year-old Weldon’s bed; and ghosts unaccountably darken the rooms at her New Zealand high school (a sort of advance haunting, she now thinks, by the woman who was to be killed nearby in the murder dramatised in the film Heavenly ...”