“... renewed love affair with finance capital, in the teeth of the ineptitude and corruption on Wall Street, breathes new life into Nader’s critique of two-party politics. The manifest failure of presidential leadership and a dispiriting return to politics as usual suggest that this is an appropriate time for a reconsideration of Nader, who deserves to be ...”

“... from Normandy, where he had been stationed since late 1943, tasked with bolstering the Atlantic Wall against a possible Allied invasion of Western Europe. The Atlantic Wall was a line of steel and concrete coastal fortifications that stretched from Norway to South-West France. In Nazi propaganda Goebbels boasted about ...”

“... even in sixth-century Whithorn on the Solway Firth, beyond the now abandoned Hadrian’s Wall. One intriguing feature of British Christianity is that, far from fading away after 410 along with hypocausts and decent flooring, it spread beyond the imperial frontiers into Ireland and southern Scotland. Latin inscriptions multiplied, and more and more ...”

“... When the AU summit convenes, the heads of state will attend a brief ceremony where a bullet-marked wall once stood, and unveil the foundation stone of a memorial – its form yet to be decided – to those who suffered and died in Alem Bekagn, and to the victims of human rights violations throughout Africa, including the Rwandese Tutsis. The African Union ...”

“... beginning, it’s hard to think of the child as safe. The knife is like Chekhov’s shotgun on the wall, which has to go off some time. We just don’t hear it going off. This is the 20th century, and Pinter has been here. The Cryptogram knows where it’s going, but seems uncertain about the road or the reasons. It’s hard to tell whether this is an effect ...”

“... performance in that election was the response of his main adversary, the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon-Walker. Gordon-Walker had led Labour’s Parliamentary opposition to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962, the first ever legislative restriction on the right of entry into Britain of some 600 million citizens of the Commonwealth. He and his ...”

“... Borrow, who captivated Victorian readers with his tales of Spain and Wales. In our own time, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to the Balkans in the 1930s and Rory Stewart (and dog) walked through Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Macfarlane is a member of this group of walkers, with the extra strand that he knows he is ...”

“... few hours before the boat leaves, so as well as drinking and whoring and waiting – ‘He finds a wall and sits down upon it; when he is hungry, he sucks a stone’ – he passes the time by killing and robbing a Shetlander who won’t buy him more than one drink, and beating, raping and murdering a nine-year-old ‘nigger boy’. Not one of the good guys ...”

“... of a young boy: the wonder of childhood is there as well as paternal abuse. St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels are anchored in the narrator’s early experience of rape by his father, but formally the books are comedies of manners and the drama plays out in parties, drug binges, vacations. There’s a lot of child rape – at the hands of ...”

“... to do? Go to the movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to ...”

“... that bacteria use to build their cell walls. MRSA strains acquired a gene (mecA) that codes for a wall-building protein resistant to methicillin. Less than a year after the publication of the optimistic prediction in the Lancet, the first MRSA were described. Two years later, in 1963, there was the first outbreak in a British hospital. An MRSA strain at Queen ...”

“... Commenting on​ Occupy Wall Street in late 2011, Barney Frank, then a Democratic congressman for Massachusetts, voiced a common complaint: ‘I don’t understand why people think that simply being in a physical place does much.’ Nearly five years later, it isn’t easy to decide whether Frank was right. Part of the puzzle is that the Occupy movement had a strange double character, both tactic (something to be done) and discourse (something to talk about ...”

“... companies ailed, if they couldn’t stand on their own two feet, then they would have to go to the wall. There was no room for lame ducks as there had been in the dark days of the Heath Administration of the early Seventies. That government’s slackness towards ailing companies had ushered in all sorts of horrors – strong trade unions, a Labour ...”

“... coloured gouaches or collages around the walls of a room. Pointing to those shown along one wall, he asked me whether I didn’t agree that these images were suggestive of male genitals; I said I thought they could well be. Pointing to those on the opposite wall, he asked whether I didn’t agree that these might be ...”

“... me in hot pursuit of my father. At the end of the street there was a cemetery. Don leapt over the wall, my father followed, with me bringing up the rear, all chasing one another like ghosts among the gravestones. His luck finally ran out, however. Coming home one evening seriously the worse for wear, he slipped on the front steps, fell backwards and cracked ...”