“... but the rest of the fat world will have to wait longer for its get-thin pills. The truth is, they may never come, but anyone who starts to read this book could be forgiven for thinking we’re almost there. Shell, who writes, and teaches the writing of, science journalism in the US, has mixed remarkable stories such as that of the Punjabi cousins, with smart ...”

“... schemes to govern Iraq’s bedouin tribes, Shiite townsmen, urban Sunnis and mountain Kurds, and may take into account the smaller minorities of Turcomen, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Yazidis. Garner, who retired from the US Army in 1997 as a three-star general and then worked for L-3 Communications, an armaments company, is the man sent by President Bush to run ...”

“... group to restrict itself to fighting in Iraq – a suggestion Isis rejected out of hand. Zawahiri may now have some regrets but he also knows that Baghdadi may eventually fail – because of his reliance on extreme violence if for no other reason. It was a lesson al-Qaida learned the hard way. September 11 had set the bar ...”

“... an autobiography, or as giving the whole story. Regard it as pointing a way out of the woods that may only take us deeper into them. It provides lyrics, no matter that Sondheim admits to enjoying the music more. As any admirer knows, his gift is the unmatched dance of music and lyrics, the nearly stammered wordsmith skill that he calls ordinary ...”

“... companies and then siphoned off by the government under legal compulsion. Our communicative doings may be likened to a fishpond stocked with both actual and conjectural fish. The new protocol allows the government to vacuum up the entire pond, while preserving a posture quite innocent of trespass, since it means to do nothing with the contents just then. The ...”

“... bank BCCI, which reported in 1992. The inquiry promised that ‘any individual or department which may be criticised … will be given a full opportunity to challenge the criticisms and rebut adverse findings of fact before any final conclusion is reached.’ The Matrix Churchill inquiry into arms sales to Iraq, which began later the same year, made the same ...”

“... as an object, a thing, half-separated from its significance. He is creating a formal pattern. He may not be aware that, by repeating the word, he produces this abstract effect on the page. Such an experience of pinkie pointillism may be legible only now, to the reader who has the luxury of seeing the Notebooks as a whole ...”

“... time translating, then went off to translate a text edited by Reeve. An accurate text, however, may not have mattered much to most of Geoffrey’s early readers. By the time he wrote his History there were some signs that an interest in Arthur was already growing among the French-speaking ruling classes of Western Europe, having been incubated for centuries ...”

“... of her situation, and the stoicism with which she faces it, are handled with a restraint that may disappoint admirers of the breathtaking lyricism of the narrative voice developed for Ruth in Housekeeping. Home and Housekeeping might also be said to form a diptych, though one based on antitheses rather than similarities. The earlier novel, despite its ...”

“... is economic will argue that people experience scarcities precisely because they are poor. You may think that a study of past societies could throw some light on the question. Most people have heard about the marked decline in the population of Easter Island some three centuries ago; they may know, too, of the pueblos ...”

“... or did it develop by stages from an original formless mass (epigenesis)? These questions may have been reformulated over the centuries, but they are still at the heart of the life sciences. The unfortunate error of timing, which made the questions harder to answer, was that biology developed as a science later than physics. Physics – above all ...”

“... open a door between truth and fantasy, suggesting that the boundaries between reality and illusion may not be as fixed as one would want. In Hangsaman, a novel about a college student who goes missing, it isn’t clear until late in the book that Natalie Waite’s best friend ‘Tony’ is imaginary. The two complain about dorm life and talk about their joy in ...”

“... years I have known myself to be on the right path.’ But there is a nagging sense that the Nazis may not have fully appreciated the importance of his thinking. Stuck in the positivistic biologism of the 19th century, they have not grasped that ‘for the last 15 years this change of the whole of being has been prepared, a change in which the movement must ...”

“... flux of the trucks and the people coming in and out of the boats.’ Earlier this year, as Theresa May’s government pushed to persuade people to back her EU withdrawal agreement, Dover was held up to illustrate the chaos that might follow from a no-deal Brexit. With no one sure of what customs papers to sign, lorries on their way to the port would be held up ...”

“... their effect. Authoritarian elites, in Syria as elsewhere, are largely immune to embargoes and may even profit from them because they have the power to monopolise scarce resources. The poor and the powerless, the great majority of Syrians after nearly a decade of war, are those who suffer the full impact of sanctions. As Suha Ahmad was shocked to ...”