“... dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the turbulent passage through Mach 1; and then the different challenge as the speed continues to rise and the airflow over the aeroplane’s wings changes in character again, smoothing out, yet condensing ...”

“... countryside – are forbidden to outsiders, by legal, physical and practical barriers. The biggest barrier is purposelessness: even where a right of way exists, why use it? To walk from one village to another? We have roads and cars for that. Few who live in ‘the country’ – that is, in villages – stray from metalled roads except along a handful of ...”

“... banned abortions after fifteen weeks. The Mississippi Department of Health wanted to set the legal barrier for access to abortion below the stage of foetal viability (when the foetus can survive outside the uterus). But the Dobbs court went much further, and rejected viability as a legal concept, overturning both Roe and the 1992 Supreme Court decision in ...”

“... and of the United States itself. A magnificent and costly border wall – ‘the fence’, ‘the barrier’ – now runs in sections, like a work by Christo and Jeanne Claude, along parts of the frontier, but the terrain in most of Arizona is so fierce that it was thought until recently to be a stronger disincentive to illegal entry than any man-made ...”

“... gathering on the bridge, Romanian border guards removed all passport controls and lifted the barrier. Nobody ran, there were too many people. They just shuffled across. Behind them, and benefiting from a radiantly clear day, German planes swooped low to strafe the twenty-mile bottleneck of refugees.Those who made it into Romania plugged doggedly ...”

“... equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be ‘organisationally outflanked’ by those above them. Nowhere has this condition been more extreme than in India. There the country is divided into some thirty major linguistic groups, under the cornice of the colonial language ...”

“... points entertained them – but against any passage of these to action lies the formidable barrier of a unanimity of media opinion more complete, and more committed to Turkish entry, than that of the Council or Commission itself. There is also the simple fact that no country that has been accepted as a candidate for accession to the EU has ever, once ...”

“... Angela knew Anthony and Ann when they first met. ‘He had a huge picture of the singer George Michael above his bed,’ said Angela. ‘Everybody teased him about it, but he said: “One day I’ll be famous like him.”’ Angela was wearing huge hooped earrings and slippers covered in hearts. Whenever she got excited she kicked an Argos catalogue that ...”

“... the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”