“... such limited standards of comparison with the/sexual/behaviour of other characters people. But I may be wrong. Perhaps everyone knows what everyone does in bed sexually nowadays. But if they don’t know – if sex is not a widely illuminated social area in which every person’s or every couple’s activities can be surveyed by everyone else – as ...”

“... and swamped with heavy traffic revolving round the Odium Cinema. Unsatisfactory as much of this may be, and every scene has the same beggar in the costume of the age, the worst is yet to come. In ‘The Drayneflete of Tomorrow’ there are no human figures. The church has been preserved as a cultural monument, but the rest is a panorama of ‘Communal ...”

“... with the view of progress Rushdie attributes to him: ‘The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age.’ Never too shy to put himself in illustrious company (‘Joseph Anton’ was the codename he adopted, aligning himself with Conrad and Chekhov, after Khomeini’s ...”

“... series of tests ever done in the continental United States. There were 29 tests beginning on 28 May and ending on 7 October. The highest explosive yield was Hood, the test that took place on 5 July – the equivalent of 74 kilotons of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb was about 20 kilotons. Smoky was the second highest, with 44 kilotons equivalent. The series, during ...”

“... of prayer; more, to revere the visual effects their art has to offer and the release these may bring into contemplative pleasure. (Much as we hope to respect the wish of people not to be stared at.) And then, remembering that if we are looking on, this art will most likely be either tourist merchandise or tied to some ‘heritage’ project, we are ...”

“... If Holmes is insignificant as art, his indestructibility is all the more significant. The wizard may be no more than a conjuror, but he has been consulted, fêted and decorated by prime ministers, kings, sultans, popes and Queen Victoria herself, not because he’s the Great Detective, but because he’s the Great Performer. That’s why he’s not such a ...”

“... began, he neither acknowledged the protesters’ demands nor regretted the killings. By May 2011, a fully fledged armed uprising had begun, with defectors from the Syrian army returning fire at the security forces. Soon the defectors, now organised as the Free Syrian Army, faced increased violence from the regime, which began using heavy weaponry ...”

“... and followers. We make shopping lists and bucket lists and reading lists; wishlists of DVDs we may one day watch or seeds we hope to plant and catalogues of countries we have visited or books we have read. To go to a shop armed with a scrap of paper that says ‘eggs, milk, pears’ is to believe that you have a script and are the one in charge, even if ...”

“... his explained, that, ‘if one emphasises too much that it is a crime to kill a whole people, it may weaken the conviction that it is already a crime to kill one individual.’ The counterargument was Lemkin’s, that ‘the focus on individuals was naive, that it ignored the reality of conflict and violence,’ and that ‘the law must reflect true motive ...”

“... snorted: ‘Bernie, you never carry tweezers into court? Nail clippers, yes . . .’ ‘You may scoff,’ Bernie said, ‘but I have known nasty injuries occur from slivers of flying glass, where in the hands of a man trained by the St John Ambulance, a handy pair of sterilised – ’ But then Nicolette gave a squeak of triumph. She held up the plug of ...”

“... emotions and sex lives of the enthusiasts (even in the tree tops), however fact-checked the latter may be. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that a college dropout called Michael Taylor, who worked as a knife salesman and grocery clerk, came to figure out which were the world’s tallest trees: everyone knew they were redwoods, but the precise trees had not been ...”

“... in a way. I mean there is such a great army of them and it is all so expensive for Lord Moyne (may he burn in hell). The sisters’ nicknames are very good, like a poem by Nash. Unity was Bird or Birdie, Bobo or Boudy or Boud, Pamela was Woman, sometimes Woo or Wooms. Diana was Cord or Honks and often Nard or Nardy. Deborah is always Debo, except when she ...”

“... it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan’s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints ...”

“... game a-swearing, or about some act/That has no relish of salvation in’t … that his soul may be as damned and black/As hell, whereto it goes’, he isn’t being the pausing, self-deceiving hero that late 18th-century critics thought he was. Instead, he’s a version of the traditional figure of the devil who carries a sinner off to hell before the ...”

“... on 12 July on the coast of the Sahara desert?’ This and other corrections to the account may be ‘slight’, as Miles says, but they confirm the untrustworthiness of Savigny and Corréard. By this point in the book, the two survivors’ account is utterly discredited in any case. Their attempt to show that the Restoration was the root of the whole ...”