“... orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a ...”

“... and a call back from the brink. The nature it describes is a web of interdependencies, which may be damaged through our acts. This was a shock; for the first time Nature was destructible. All at once, keeping animals in the bath could not be all right. To remove a creature from its habitat and take it to another country could no longer be the act of a ...”

“... science or birth control. When people are ‘victims’ of their own government, military means may be used (if the risk of retaliation is low). Gbagbo’s violent rejection of majority rule, like Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya, is a case in point. In Zimbabwe, however, no intervention. The international community intervenes à la carte. Other reasons are more ...”

“... they had better job prospects than their children; they enjoyed more authority in the family and may even have been in better health. They were widely believed to have opted for witchcraft as a way to get on as migrant labourers and then brought it home, almost by accident, to contaminate their relatives. Easy then to conclude that your father is using ...”

“... of Pacific Rim academia. ‘In Boulder, if you tell an obscene politically incorrect joke, someone may laugh,’ Clark said. ‘And if you say something incredibly insulting to a person of another race, and you are incriminating yourself in every deep form of awfulness, they laugh. Ed found that he couldn’t get a reaction. So he increasingly exaggerated the ...”

“... a writer with no theoretical training,’ he writes, ‘but I possess a fertile imagination … I may be ignorant of high-flown literary concepts, but I do know how to spin a bewitching tale, something I learned as a child from my grandfather, my grandmother and a variety of village storytellers. Critics who base their views of literature on scientific ...”

“... flak as well. That it was Carter who chose him is the real significance of his appointment, which may be the reason Caryl doesn’t include him: he doesn’t represent a clean enough break. Carter didn’t turn to Volcker because the public was demanding tough medicine. He did it because Wall Street wanted the medicine, and the public no longer had the ...”

“... Eventually borderline personality disorder is settled on: ‘Such patients,’ the manual says, ‘may seem charming, composed and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.’ At last an account Didion is willing to accept: ‘I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair’: I had seen her ...”

“... problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be.We haven’t yet got a glimpse of the far ...”

“... In​ May 1987, as part of the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ‘wisdom, foresight and sense of justice ...”

“... prowl in his gait. Lord Peter Wimsey said that you can never mistake a fellow’s back; the same may be said of Jordan’s walk. It’s not lighter, or swifter than his peers’ – not now. But these qualities matter less in basketball than balance, a rhythm that develops in men used to timing their steps to the bounce of a ball. Jordan’s most casual ...”

“... fighters were encouraged to carry out such practices by their ritual specialists, while others may have simply improvised behaviour on the basis of a received belief that this would make them powerful. They often referred to the human heart using mechanical images, calling it ‘the engine’ or ‘the main machine’. During the third battle of Monrovia ...”

“... that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by the press, but feeling hunted by the press is an aspect of self-hunting too: their famousness is an occasion for grief, and their grief is a constituent part of their fame. The newspapers love abuse stories and they love the mixture ...”

“... heroic age of pulp, rumours of mass-market readership, have elected Moorcock as their King of the May (like Allen Ginsberg in dark ages Prague). A Prince of Thieves. It’s a courtesy title: see Moorcock, in the publicity shot for the collection britpulp!, on his throne under the railway arches, a scarfed and hatted Fagin surrounded by ...”

“... sensation, when I consider that a Work which was so lately Lodged, in all privacy, in my Bureau, may now be seen by every Butcher & Baker, Cobler & Tinker, throughout the 3 kingdoms, for the small tribute of 3 pence.’ Her own book could be a thing of vulgar pleasure. Evelina was certainly written by a snob, but one sharp-sighted enough to make her sense of ...”