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“... The success​ of the Normandy landings in June 1944 brightened the mood in London, but some people worried that Germany would lash out in revenge. One morning, on the Isle of Dogs, William Regan heard a small plane fly over and get shot down, causing a surprisingly large explosion. The same thing happened to another plane, and another. ‘I said to Alf that the gunners were on form, three over, three down ...”

“... Most writers of fiction want to give their readers the sense of an alternative passage of time to the actual one. This, the narrative drive, comes through a combination of events following one another in chronological order and events having consequences that lead to other events – a mix, in other words, of the consecutive and the contingent. Pride and Prejudice, The Big Sleep and The Code of the Woosters are both consecutive and contingent ...”

“... Last September, the Royal Society organised a conference to discuss Edward Hooper’s book The River, which promoted the theory that HIV was accidentally spread to humans from chimpanzees through a polio vaccination programme in Africa in the 1950s. Coincidentally, or not, on the eve of the conference, a British TV channel screened the 1995 Hollywood thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman as a maverick military virologist given hours to find a vaccine to halt the spread of a deadly African virus in California before the military obliterates the town where it has taken hold ...”

“... In 1870, the Imperial authorities in London ordered a heraldic designer to come up with a flag and crest for a part of the British Empire called Turks and Caicos. The designer had never heard of the place, but he was sent a sketch by a local artist which showed a typical scene: men wielding long-handled instruments and, behind them, large white mounds ...”

“... fifth columnists within their families, nagging their parents to the checkout. The marketing guru James U. McNeal, in his 1992 book Kids as Customers, identifies the Seven Major Nags used by children to get what they want. There’s the repetitive Pleading Nag (‘Oh please, please, please’); the Persistent Nag, where the child doggedly lobbies for the ...”

“... In Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the killer demon Azazello has a wonderful talent. He can shoot someone in a named part of their heart – an auricle, say, or a ventricle. He puts a bullet hole through a marked spot on a seven of spades even though the card is covered by a pillow. His skill arouses Margarita, who has ‘a passion for all people who do anything to perfection ...”

“... This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out spontaneously and touch each other: for men to be able to dispense with verbal courtship, for women to put aside cultural restraint, discrimination and any desire to be seduced; and for the sexes to spend as much time as they can cope with in mutually rewarding fornication ...”

“... The advantage of a story set in wartime is that all the characters are obliged to form a relationship with death. Death is the life and soul of the war party. You can get death to come to parties in peacetime, too. Murders happen. Cars crash. Cancer buds. But he isn’t expected in every house, on every street. In the novels of European peace, the consequences of betrayal are difficult to define, let alone dramatise, in the dispiriting but seldom fatal mess of divorce, poverty or failure ...”

“... In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other. What would the Rev. Morris have made of the scandalous truth? Far from being monogamous, the dunnocks, from a Victorian point of view, have shockingly lax morals ...”

“... The government​ is making it harder to vote. As of 4 May, when local elections take place in some parts of England, and in all British elections after that, everyone who votes at a polling station will have to show photographic proof that they are who they say they are. Some have made the comparison with voter suppression in the US, where Republicans impose onerous ID requirements to keep the vote down among those least likely to have suitable documents – namely the poor, who are assumed to lean Democrat ...”

“... In a James Bond film, viewer credulity gets its toughest workout with the hero’s tour of, and subsequent escape from, the villain’s lair. This power-crazed evil genius, this smug gentleman in a tightly tailored suit posing as a bold entrepreneur: how was he able to construct a paramilitary base over a dozen square miles in the middle of, say, the United States, without its raising an eyebrow among the local constabulary? How did he get the zeppelin hangar past the county planning board? Such vast amounts of concrete ...”

“... From the outside​ , 100 Piccadilly is rooted in the psychic space of London, England, or at least this part of London: plastic Union Jacks, haggard tourists, sleek servants, billionaires’ children, dark, hoarded property. The golden stone of its modest neoclassical façade, designed by Robert Edis in 1883, blends into the street front overlooking Green Park ...”

“... A few years ago, Stephen O’Rahilly, a professor of metabolic medicine at Cambridge and consultant of last resort for the dangerously overweight, had two cousins from the Punjab referred to him for treatment. One was an eight-year-old girl who weighed almost 190 pounds and was too heavy to walk. The other was a two-year-old boy. He tipped the scales at 65 pounds ...”

“... In the slow weeks before the Taliban fled Kabul, weeks of B-52 vapour trails drawn across blank blue skies, of sporadic bombing and constant rumour, it was easy to find General Abdul Basir. He kept open house in his office, a small, single-storey building at the mouth of the Salang Valley. Bare mountains crowded close on every side, shutting out the light ...”

“... Head north from San Francisco on Highway 101, across the Golden Gate Bridge. If you leave the downtown area at around 7.30 in the morning, even with sea fog moving in, you’ll make it to Sebastopol in time for a breakfast stop around 9. Press on west towards the coast and by mid-morning, not far from the lonely petrol station where Alfred Hitchcock filmed the most famous sequence in The Birds, you’ll be at Fort Ross ...”