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“... from a river in a spray of high-definition slow-motion droplets, stags rutting in a shallow river (more spray), dolphins racing through shafts of underwater sunlight, an otter likewise, a puffin defending its catch of eels from a black-headed gull, a murmuration of starlings swirling through the evening skies – gives way to a few seconds of satellite footage ...”

“... an elliptical novel can subside dolefully into a series of flat notes. Of the two, Wrinkles is the more original and interesting. It consists of forty-odd biographical sketches, each about three pages in length, of an unnamed middle-aged man. Each moves from childhood through maturity to old age, beginning in the past tense as a record of fact and ending in ...”

“... he sucks a stone’ – he passes the time by killing and robbing a Shetlander who won’t buy him more than one drink, and beating, raping and murdering a nine-year-old ‘nigger boy’. Not one of the good guys then. Or, as McGuire puts it, ‘this courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy ...”

“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”

“... and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in 1592 as one whose ‘daily practyse and living’ was writing for the theatre. Thomas Nashe certainly wrote for the public playhouses in the early 1590s – his friend Greene ...”

“... gain such a benefit from any other chance, and this cannot be measured by tens of years but rather more than that.Osama bin Laden, March 1997Once, the Kabul Zoo housed ninety varieties of animals and got a thousand visitors a day, but in the era of fighting that followed the fall of the Soviets and then of Najibullah, the people stayed away, and the animals ...”

“... in 1954. The roads were bad, there wasn’t much food and it was almost impossible to get more than a transit visa. A few intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the ...”

“... nerd with bad skin who still lives with his (ill, possessive) mother. They’re all QPR fans; all more or less thirty. Every year, without fail, the four of them celebrate 14 August, the anniversary of a perfect (in their collective memory, anyway) day they spent together in 1984, ‘halfway through the last summer we were together at school’. But in 1998 ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... that ‘the terrorists … would not survive.’ The deaths of the talented gunmen shouldn’t be more regrettable than those of their more ordinary comrades, but they are because the story has paid more attention to them all along. The novel confuses two different injustices here: on the ...”

“... is between Hannah and Robert, an alcoholic dentist. Alcoholism and dentistry have coincided, more grotesquely, in Kennedy’s fiction before: a desperate character in Everything You Need (1999), a publisher called Jack Grace, visits a sadist in Soho to be administered alcohol enemas; by way of payment, the sadist gets to extract one of Jack’s teeth ...”

“... older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with’ – that would be Château Haut-Brion, still ...”

“... Belgian entrepreneur, but unquestionably a secondary character in the novel. Cayce, one of the more memorable heroes in 21st-century American fiction – who, as it happens, would never in a million years work for Dominic Cummings – is relegated to a minor role as an anonymous ‘weirdo’ hireling. Verity Jane, in Gibson’s new novel, Agency (Jane is ...”

“... like a snake disturbed from its tree’. It’s unlikely if not impossible that Randeep would be more familiar with snakes than electric cables, but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t ...”

“... Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the ...”