“... 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 four-bar phrases tacked onto other four-bar phrases to which they bear no relationship’. This may be true but it misses the point. Prokofiev comes across as a traditionalist in an age of sordid licentiousness. Even when he indulged the sordid, as in his ballet Chout, he was outmanoeuvred. It was dropped from the repertoire of the Ballets Russes in favour ...”

“... catering to these folk – if not in person, then in the persons of those they buy and let to. Rob may speak of river walkways and thoroughfares running between the new blocks (all of which are to be named, touchingly, after ex-power station workers), but even on the tiny scale afforded by the model in the sales centre, the development screams ...”

“... as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff. But then we are all amateurs in and of our own lives.’ ‘We may allow Death, like God, to be an occasional ironist,’ Barnes says. But there is one final, terrible irony to the book, surely unimaginable when Barnes was writing it but which for someone reading it now is impossible to ignore. Nothing to Be Frightened Of ...”

“... is not a Bolshevist, an Atheist, or a Communist, is not a Prohibitionist, in spite of what anyone may say, her husband was not a conscientious objector, and her children are not neglected.’ She was disappointed that the first woman to take a seat in the Commons was the Conservative Nancy Astor, whom she did not consider ‘a good specimen for the first ...”

“... outmoded furniture, crumpled sheets, daylight streaming through windows. There is no sign of what may have happened the night before.The ghosts themselves do not at first seem very frightening. Many are identified only by faint physical traces: the scent of violets in the pantry; a pool of water by the window; a small round mark, like a cigarette burn, on the ...”

“... Whereas Fraz fades from Hark in a cruelly absurd death scene, Tovah thrives. The drone apocalypse may have arrived, but she’s once again writing poems, apparently good ones: ‘Tovah begins to read her poem, and the more she reads, the more she feels herself spiralling up and away from her words, her voice. The more she reads her poem, the more it sounds ...”

“... Indeed, they are dark, smelly, dank passageways where, as Oscar Newman … argued, “crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.”’ Robin Hood Gardens​ coincided with what John Boughton describes as a ‘golden age of council house building’, but in Municipal Dreams he doesn’t include it in his ‘pantheon’, ‘despite the affection in ...”

“... distance from some school – suddenly stuff like that did get approved. The activity level may also change due to specific intelligence, or simply because the only remaining targets are not within the range permitted by level one, ‘because the “target bank” had been depleted.’ ‘Hamas is pushing for a display of victory,’ that’s always ...”

“... men’ and merchants as well as ‘lords spiritual and temporal’. But while Empson and Dudley may have been more than usually effective agents of the royal will, they were, as everybody knew, merely the best-known examples of a type of servant that had been at the heart of Henry VII’s regime from the outset. These ‘new men’, as they would become ...”

“... have the balls to press it – and they’re right.Cixin’s view of the universe as a dark forest may be pessimistic, but his view of humanity and its future is extremely optimistic. We are not in the end times: we are babies at the foot of a long staircase. We will develop superhard nanomaterials that will allow us to build an elevator to space. We will ...”

“... wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.You may see nothing still to be lost.Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.In the American editions of these memoirs, the lighter letters on the cover of The Year of Magical Thinking spell ‘JOHN’. The lighter letters on the cover of Blue ...”

“... plans for the Paras, and then expected the soldiers to sort out any problems for themselves. In May 1982, near the tiny settlement of Goose Green, ‘H’ Jones led a Para assault of questionable strategic value against a larger Argentinian force, which had access to ground-attack aircraft, artillery guns and napalm. If you go to Goose Green you can ...”

“... So too did Madeleine Thiéry, the baker’s wife who made the cake, and it seems that Marguerite may have given her away when the Germans threatened to shoot the Barbier sons if she did not name other Resistance supporters in the village. Before she was deported to Germany, Marguerite tried to hang herself in her cell.In retrospect, Rée refused either to ...”

“... are both commodities to be traded up by those with social aspirations is nicely overturned. You may love Kate but you hanker for a slag. And there’s the hint of a solution to the dilemma in the ad, which as well as making the connection between food and sex is also perhaps offering them as alternatives, suggesting that the lower appetite might be assuaged ...”