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“... sense his unease with the course his novel is taking, its increasingly plodding second half, its jerry-rigged resolution. Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s final section. As the grandfather, unable to live with himself in the light of the newly remembered truth, writes out his suicide note, it cuts off, mid-sentence: ‘I will walk without ...”

“... know whether to look sinister or sympathetic. He clears his throat a lot. A Vietnamese technician (Jerry Ziesmer) reverses the oriental stereotype by looking like an ordinary human being, and far less inscrutable than either of the other two. He plays a tape of Kurtz muttering about a snail on a razor’s edge, and complaining about the lies being told by the ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their ...”

“... wheels bolted to planks – the first skateboarders. There are girls and boys, black and white, from the city’s poorest neighbourhood, and they outnumber the spectating parents in the photograph by 13 to one. The boy whose father takes him swimming, the girl whose mother takes her to the theatre, children whose parents ‘do things’ with them ...”

“... path. Take Marco Rubio, a former protégé of Bush, who is often hailed as the great other-than-white hope for a party that fares badly among younger and Latino voters. On paper, Rubio presents as an American success story in the log-cabin mould: the son of struggling Cuban immigrants, he scaled the heights of the American meritocracy. He had a youthful ...”

“... been exploited by Michael Moorcock in fables of sword and sorcery, the reality-collages of the Jerry Cornelius saga, the dark shadows of the Pyatt quartet. But the salutation at the start of this new epic is unexpected: ‘pard’. Moorcock, in high Victorian conceit, likes to get the story rolling by speaking directly, as writer and performer, to his ...”

“... by an earthquake. Ono spent the next few days busying himself with camping stoves, generators and jerry cans, and paying little attention to the news. But once television was restored it was impossible to be unaware of what had happened. Ono watched the endlessly replayed image of the explosive plume above the nuclear reactor, and the mobile phone films of ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews. “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ For all his braggadocio, ‘Ben Nitay’ was still floundering well into the 1970s. He gave occasional speeches in the Boston area on behalf of the Israeli government, which recognised an asset in his special forces ...”

“... rising pre-tax inequality, the disparity in post-tax incomes is substantially moderated. If the jerry-rigged global economic system is in jeopardy, it is because of the spectacular failure of the American political establishment.Not every part of the American government machine has failed. The world economy relies on the dollar as a common currency, and the ...”

“... This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fuelled both the Cold War space race and Ronald ...”

“... with companies or other commercial organisations, with the MPs Michael Grylls and Sir Jerry Wiggin holding as many as ten such positions each. Despite all the opportunities for financial gain within the rules, there have even been examples of a willingness to take a more covert approach to the business of making money. During the 1989-90 ...”

“... realised that they had ‘two different Blakes’. McClure spoke of it in an interview with Jerry Aronson: ‘Allen has a Blake who is a Blake of prophesy, a Blake who speaks out against the dark satanic mills. My Blake is a Blake of body and of vision. Blake was such a powerful, such a great being that it’s possible for every one of us to have an ...”

“... of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 Teignmouth Road, NW2, built around 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between ...”