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“... cast the United States as uniquely virtuous’, but having Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered ...”

“... more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has hollowed out political language, the void filled by an apparently apolitical alternative – the neoliberal discourse of antiseptic intervention ...”

“... discovery of the bisexual life his son had led. The son turns out to have been a former lover of Samantha Valdés, the daughter of the local narco boss. More victims pile up, but Mendieta has a hard time working out a connection between them or identifying a suspect, despite the killer’s flashy signature. (The town’s professional hitmen don’t approve ...”

“... incident. People walk and talk, drink and think, but what happens in the book is … Ulysses. Samantha Harvey’s rich new novel, Orbital, turns the world-in-a-day idea around, playing with both its key terms. All the book’s action, or (less urgent word) activity, takes place on the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth. The two definitions ...”

“... a word: take the first letters of their Christian names and surnames and they spell out the word Samantha. That’s a rebus; it’s also the name of Rebus’s daughter. He dashes off to find her but she has already been abducted by the killer, an army buddy of Rebus’s who cracked during SAS training and has held a grudge against him ever since. Rebus gets ...”

“... in this country are women. From all this one might conclude that female initiative and worldly power are still savagely limited. But how right would one be? Some of the answers can be found, though not alas at first reading, in Naim Attallah’s huge, rather silly and sporadically illuminating book, which is explicitly devoted to female ...”

“... a global audience, made up mainly of readers for whom your books have been an introduction to the power of fiction? It’s a readership Rowling has honestly earned. For quite a while her publishers seemed to be running to catch up with her sudden popularity, rather than scheming to promote it. Her reward has been a relatively restrained backlash: Christian ...”

“... to science and the verifiable, and is tone deaf to figurative language. Soon after it came to power, one BJP minister proclaimed that ancient Indians must have possessed the technology to build aeroplanes since the epics mention flying chariots. Modi then added that the elephant-headed god Ganesh was proof that plastic surgery existed in ancient ...”

“... birth’ in pregnancy discourse, ‘mothers and expectant mothers have far less power than we should.’ In fact, she continued,the vast majority of resources on pregnancy and motherhood direct our eyes and minds to issues that don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. The problems we face are much bigger: a culture in which men ...”

“... had been summoned by the Sun newspaper in order to transport their big-busted page-three girl, Samantha Fox, inside the wire for a photo call. Not long afterwards the resulting picture was splashed across the front page of the Sun. The ‘story’ read: EYES FRONT! Sexy soldier Sam Fox inspects her loyal troops in the war of Wapping.   Bravely ...”

“... for theft, false pretences and ‘actual bodily harm’ – who knows that within the corridors of power there is ‘always someone bursting to tell. It’s the pressure. Like the garden hose.’ His campaign, which is called OPEN, thrives on people like Hilary who bring to it the secrets of the confessional. Officially, Terry’s campaigning appeal is based ...”

“... semi-dirt and pursues a certain political line because in large social groups the breasts of Samantha Fox and the opinions of Margaret Thatcher combine effectively. Lord Beaverbrook, a loving, unfaithful husband who had women the way most people have buttered toast, kept the Express smutless, while he promoted only those politicians he either cared for ...”

“... society is swamped by spectacle, by images directed at us, may also have to be revised. If power today depends largely on data – on invisible information harvested, searched, surveilled and acted on by corporations, governments, insurance companies, credit agencies and police departments – how are we to track it, let alone challenge it? Detail ...”

“... ended, as well-bred girls’ forenames must, in ‘a’: Nigella, Cosima, Candida, Sophia, Samantha, Sabrina, Lucinda. ‘Famous Englishmen write to me about their daughters,’ Attallah shrugs. ‘What else can I do? I have to find a job for them.’ Erdal was brought up in Fife, the daughter of a woman who sold Spirella corsets from her bedroom and ...”

“... and unreliable testimony was not in itself a proof of guilt. Pistorius’s former girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, put it most simply: ‘It definitely didn’t make sense to me. I would … I don’t know, I find that kind of weird, I definitely wouldn’t close the door, especially if it’s not even connected to the bedroom. I don’t know why someone ...”