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“... In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war ...”

“... as revealing as they seem. He may have been inspired by the multiple narrators of The Woman in White: like witnesses presenting their evidence the characters contradict and expose themselves. Agatha Christie’s famously unfair mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is written as a diary, proving just how unreliable ‘honest’ narrators can be. Sayers ...”

“... are given his opinion on hanging group shows (go alphabetical), the painting of gasometers (choose white), and the droit de suite legislative proposals of 1930 (he’s against).Sickert’s commentaries are not simply pungently phrased; many of them retain their power to bite. His own technical experience and the relative cohesiveness of the era’s critical ...”

“... or diplomatically, so instead attempted to undermine the spiritual foundation of Islam. A white man with a Western name wouldn’t be able to get the job done – better to use an Indian Muslim to pit Muslims against one another. According to Mohajerani, Rushdie received a handsome advance and in return was tasked with showing that the Prophet ...”

“... writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her ...”

“... with garden peas (Pisum sativum): round or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seed colour; purple or white flowers. Taking great care to keep his self-fertilising stock as pure as possible, so he could be confident that, for example, the green-seeded peas reliably produced only green seeds and yellow-seeded ones only yellow, he proceeded to hybridise them and ...”

“... but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable ...”

“... a fugitive from America since being prosecuted under the Mann Act for his liaison with a teenage white girl. Cravan said of him: ‘After Poe, Whitman and Emerson he is the greatest glory of America.’ There was a background of artistic interest in boxing at this time, but although Braque and Picasso made drawings of black boxers they never went as far as ...”

“... in a prose that looked decidedly non-experimental – pure, classical, like something carved from white marble.’ Even so, a host of critics (mostly male) simply missed the point. Among other things, the decidedly odd and unsexy ‘Miss Cather’ was deemed to be insufficiently engaged with Big Social Issues. During the Depression she came under violent ...”

“... female accomplice just about to dive, far out at sea, into the jaws of a helpful shark, the white-faced red-clad woman looking ‘like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The extreme diffusion of the Ancient Mariner in modern culture helps to show how very odd a classic Coleridge’s poem is: we tend not to be ...”

“... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...”

“... Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... good on food, as in The Golden Age, with its descriptions of the disgusting fare served at FDR’s White House) of the eras in which each of the novels is set. To debunk the ‘breathtaking lies’ of received opinion, academic as well as popular. To trace a great theme: America’s rise (or fall) from ‘flawed republic’ to ‘murderous ...”

“... and destruction. Lindqvist draws on an extraordinary array of apocalyptic novels, starting with William D. Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence, published in 1881. ‘I know what is going to happen to you, since for me it has already happened,’ Professor Meister, its visionary hero, insists. The future on which he reports is to be one of massive population ...”