“... 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 ...”

“... treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home. This is ...”

“... was distributed to the Western media and a gruesome clip was shown on CBS news. Invited to the White House to receive condolences from the president-at-war, his secretary of state and his national security adviser, Mariane Pearl told them in some detail how the United States was seen abroad and then, ‘just for the hell of it’, added that ‘my mother ...”

“... disable Iran’s nuclear programme.But there were other voices. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, a former head of policy planning at the US State Department, outlined a compromise that would limit but not end Iran’s ability to enrich uranium: it would be allowed to continue enriching uranium for use in civil nuclear reactors to produce ...”

“... prosaic set of identifiers – in one recent case ‘male, aged between twenty and thirty years, white, between 6ft and 6ft 3ins in height’ – can shrink the pool of identities to investigate to about 1500. DNA evidence is now crucial in securing convictions, and maybe Black shouldn’t have given out her advice to murderers: wash any clothes worn during ...”

“... is measured relative to the head of a brass bolt screwed to the floor inside a shabby red and white hut on the end of a pier in Newlyn, Cornwall. The bolt head is 4.75 metres above the average level of the sea, as measured every hour over the six-year period between 1915 and 1921. Oceanographers refer to this definition of sea level as ODN, which stands ...”