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“... of an ‘uchronic’ novel: set in ‘no time’, instead of Utopia’s ‘no place’. Gibson and Sterling propose that the Duke of Wellington is killed by a Luddite bomb in 1831. Tired of internecine struggle between Tories and workers, the country turns to the ‘Industrial Radical Party’ for a sweeping transformation of British society, instead of the ...”

“... in which case I suppose the appropriate title would be The Cracker Hackdown. Hackers in the Sterling sense communicate by email (electronic mail) using bulletin boards – individual computers, ‘nodes’ on the global network, which maintain files that anyone with a modem and the right phone numbers can dial up, read or write. They inhabit what the SF ...”

“... Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three major science fiction awards, and according to Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk’s main polemicist, it sent the entire genre ‘lurching from its cave into the bright sunlight of the modern zeitgeist’. Although Gibson has collaborated on an alternative Victorian history (‘steampunk’) and published ...”

“... me. No complex feelings here. He looked at me like I was another fixture. Would that I were. Bruce Sterling has recently celebrated Murakami’s ‘bold willingness to go straight over-the-top’, but Wonderland’s brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in ...”

“... later, he relayed his grave misgivings about American policy to the US ambassador to London, David Bruce. If America continued in its escalation of the conflict, he warned, it could cause the biggest rupture in Anglo-American relations since the Suez crisis. But this threat was never carried through, and Wilson would continue to provide Lyndon Johnson with ...”

“... sons. It is no accident that such words as ‘stock’, ‘capital’, ‘pecuniary’ and even ‘sterling’ come from the pastoral world. And it is the nomad’s fatal yearning for increase that causes the endless round of raid and feud, and finally tempts him to succumb to settlement. By these standards, Mr Thesiger is not a nomad but a traveller, in whom ...”

“... of internationalism had led to the SFWA invitation in the first place. A younger writer like Bruce Sterling, a founder of the cyberpunk movement and very much part of this next wave of possibility for the genre, could afford to view the tiff with comic detachment:Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of American SF back in 1976. Since then ...”

“... even between the main protagonists there was little or no consensus on constitutional principles. Bruce Ackerman says that the events he describes in his new book do ‘not support the now standard view of South Africa as a paradigmatic case of “negotiated transition” in which elites managed the tricky business of change through enlightened ...”

“... to ‘fundamentalist screwballs’ by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution on 23 January; Claire Sterling in the Washington Post of 23 January argued that the Iran story was an aspect of ‘Fright Decade I’, the war against civilisation by terrorists. For Bill Green on the same page of the Post, ‘the Iranian obscenity’ raised the possibility that the ...”

“... forced opium on China in the 1820s. Their work was continued by Scottish bureaucrats like James Bruce, the 8th earl of Elgin, whose father stole the Parthenon Marbles from Greece. ‘I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life,’ Bruce wrote of his time as high commissioner in China, during which he waged the Second ...”

“... paid off his debts by working on big-budget projects like Papillon (1973). Dalton Trumbo (1977), Bruce Cook’s genial and thorough biography, suggests that the life he designed for himself ‘rivals, and really surpasses any literary work he has undertaken’. He was born in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1905. His father was a gentle, bookish, bee-keeping ...”

“... they moved to Vienna, where Eric’s sister, Nancy, was born in 1920. Family connections and the sterling Percy brought from Egypt allowed a comfortable existence for a time, but the move was a disaster. How was an English clerk to find work in inflation-ridden Vienna? Eric was never clear quite what his father did (Evans isn’t clear either), and the ...”

“... to the Tories and £100,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies in 1981-90); Sir Jeffrey Sterling (head of P & O, which gave £370,000 during the Thatcher years); Peter Palumbo (Chairman of the Arts Council but also owner of Rugarth Investment Trust, which gave £268,099 to the Tories in 1986-8); and Sir Eric Porter (chief executive of Trafalgar ...”

“... formed with the US political élite – not only the Dulles brothers, but Harriman, McCloy, Ball, Bruce, Acheson and others – during his years in New York and Washington. Monnet’s intimacy with the highest levels of power in the hegemonic state of the hour was unique. He was to become widely distrusted in his own country because of it. How much of his ...”

“... there a danger in the American system,’ I said, ‘in creating such a platform for sterling brilliance at school that the rest of life is a struggle to maintain it?’ ‘Absolutely,’ Bill Lamb said. ‘That’s our greatest challenge. We have a lot of kids who never leave high school. They’re 30 years old and they’re still operating as ...”