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“... This book will save your life’: it’s a bold claim. In A.M. Homes’s new novel, Richard Novak has systematically removed himself from the world of human relationships. In the wake of a failed marriage, he moved to Los Angeles and set up a perfectly ordered existence. He stopped going to work years ago; instead, each morning he checks the market while exercising on his treadmill and drinks his special breakfast shakes ...”

“... says to his victim in distaste. ‘I don’t like cutting you, you know.’ Similarly, in A.M. Homes’s The End of Alice the narrator insists that a seductive little girl is forcing him to slash and stab. ‘“Why do you make me?” I’m crying. “Don’t make me.” ’ Moore and Homes are among the recent women ...”

“... of Palestine in 1948. Most of its inhabitants are descendants of people driven from their homes during the creation of Israel. Most of the Israeli settlers cleared from Gaza will move to the coastal plain south of Jaffa, which is where the refugees of Gaza came from in the first place. Not one Palestinian village there survived the destruction of ...”

“... that schools should be kept open for key workers? The staff were made to work in their pupils’ homes and, even worse, were sent to work in a different house each day, maximising their risk of infection. The teacher wanted to know whether she could refuse the new arrangement and not lose the money she’d earned. I advised her that the law protects the ...”

“... this way and that, losing more leaves with every swoop, and branches were torn away. Later I found arms of eucalyptus trees in the corral, red sap, like blood, at the severed places . . . We seemed to be watching a big fire whose flames were yellow instead of red, and it was consuming our land while we looked helplessly down. Luckily, the Santa Ana abates ...”

“... was not simply the richest man in the country as a result of large-scale corruption and the drugs/arms trade, but a CIA agent too come as a huge surprise to anyone? I’m told that in desperation Nato commissars even considered appointing a High Representative on the Balkan model to run the country, making the presidency an even more titular post than it is ...”

“... of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages. Reissued in 1871 as The Homes of Other Days, it contained more than three hundred illustrations drawn from medieval manuscripts by the brilliant engraver F.W. Fairholt. Wright was highly informative on domestic lighting, heating, meals, clothes, furniture and recreations, though not as ...”

“... suburban neighbours unhappy about the construction of a prison in the midst of their new-built homes.’ When an execution took place, crowds would gather outside the gates, as if the spectacle of the building itself substituted for the unseen scaffold within. Ken Neale, who helped oversee the partial demolition and rebuilding of Holloway in the ...”

“... been able to proceed with their pet scheme. They could not have turned householders out of their homes by compulsory purchase, or wrecked prime agricultural land. There would have had to be a public inquiry, which would have exposed their project as the folly it was. Since then, the behaviour of our masters has not greatly improved. In July 1963, when there ...”

“... New York, Paris, Milan and San Francisco, featuring boutiques and nightclubs and fashionable homes, and upwardly mobile stars such as Bryan Ferry and Liza Minnelli and Ossie Clark. The London clothes shop Biba gets more entries in the index than anything else. How far the trends portrayed spread beyond the metropolis is rarely clear. A single photograph ...”

“... peaks in mid and late June. In Yorkshire and Humberside, the worst affected areas in June, 27,000 homes and businesses were flooded. In low-lying Hull, pumps failed to cope with the deluge, and a man trying to clear a storm drain died of hypothermia, surrounded by rescuers who could not free his trapped leg. A man and a teenage boy were swept away by a flood ...”

“... gone now to malls and marts and supermarkets with meaningless or fictional monikers. But funeral homes and water-closets still stubbornly proclaim the names of the ones you’ll be doing business with. Lynch & Sons is the name of ours. Is it ego or identity crisis I sometimes ask myself. The house I live in here on Liberty was built in 1880. It had no ...”

“... in industrial parks. They also tracked down the rumour-mongers. Residents returned to their homes the next morning and order was restored to the city. Please comment on this incident.I remembered reading in the newspaper that something had happened at Yancheng four months ago, but there was no time for reflection. I picked out the key points of the ...”

“... how much the calculation matters. The co-ordinators have dedicated phone lines laid into their homes so they can still work if a terrorist attack or other incident stops them reaching the office. A similarly equipped building, near the office, is kept in constant readiness, and there’s a permanently staffed back-up site in a small town around 150 miles ...”

“... the general rise of British clutter.* Mass Observation had been asking people to describe their homes. ‘Carol Daniel,’ Sandbrook writes, was a 29-year-old Tesco shelf-stacker, living at an end of terrace house in Havering, Essex, with her husband and children. Their living room has an armchair, an orange three-section sofa, a birdcage, a fish tank and a ...”