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“... on the sofa and call it work. At any rate, the reaction to The Yellow Birds – the first novel by Kevin Powers, who enlisted at 17 in the US army and served in Iraq in 2004-5 – has been fairly hysterical. The book has been compared to All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead, The Things They ...”

“... you come?’ This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little Kingdoms, the collection in which this story appeared, was published in October 2007. Two months later, the model Katy French died ...”

“... Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to appear even more moderate, business-oriented and pro-American than Howard. Despairing media critics baptised it ‘Me-tooism’, and the result was a campaign setting new standards of witless boredom. Four days before the vote, my ...”

“... No 1 Regional Crime Squad began an investigation into the affairs of the Manchester businessman Kevin Taylor, a friend of John Stalker’s for many years. This investigation is currently the subject of a private prosecution brought by Mr Taylor against the Chief Constable of Manchester, James Anderton, which is due to be heard at Bury Magistrates Court in ...”

“... to attend overnight at an address elsewhere. These laws are based on anti-terror provisions, whose powers of forced relocation have gone without significant challenge, but their use will not be limited to criminals. They will apply to people who have done little more than attend two protests considered likely to cause serious disruption to two or more people ...”

“... faction, openly plotting revenge. Before Turnbull and Abbott, the Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard had repeatedly moved through the revolving doors of leadership, deposing each other with increasing bitterness. And on top of this, since mid-2017 Australian politics has been convulsed by a series of scandals related to Section 44 of ...”

“... want to enrich themselves have to act quickly. But the pickings are not just divided among Western powers. ‘Chinese businessmals’ have their sights set on Jidada’s mineral wealth: ‘We especially feel that friendship in your allowing us to come as we want and mine all and any of the minerals as we please, it reminds me very much like an eat-all-you-want ...”

“... bleakness of the failed landscape around them was seeping into their music. A local photographer, Kevin Cummins, was commissioned by the NME in January 1979 to take a series of portraits of Joy Division inside the grotty warehouse where the band rehearsed; most striking are those showing the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, pale and brooding, lit by dusty ...”

“... to Niehaus he saw no bathos in the fact that his granny was dashing to the toilet. Her special powers were an open secret in the family: she was ‘excessively private’, brewed expert potions for initiation masters at the circumcision lodges and was known to have mixed a euthanasia draught for an elder with a terminal illness. Luckson, too, was widely ...”

“... his shrewdness and his patience were never in doubt. All of them were shattered by relentless powers against which his talents were quite futile. Listen to Callaghan himself, describing his feelings as he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964, after Labour had won an election in peacetime conditions, when no one was out of work: ‘In all the ...”

“... So it’s pretty clear who the author has in mind when he equips his characters with uncanny powers of cultural precognition. Gibson’s career as a zeitgeist-wrangler got off to an impressive start when his science fiction novels – starting with Neuromancer (1984) – hammered out some sturdy templates for pop-cultural dystopianism. Ridley Scott’s ...”

“... every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and Beijing were staking their own claims to Africa’s postcolonial future.Ghana ...”

“... to Paris after conquering Italy. As a beautiful baleful child at school, testing his strategic powers and personal will in a snowball fight against (rather than with) his classmates, struck down by snowballs containing stones (‘Look out, Napoleon,’ cries a friendly scullion), he sheds multiple glycerine tears but is comforted by a pet eagle in a ...”

“... Canavan reports, Butler wrote about herself as though she, too, were in possession of special powers, enhanced, perhaps, by a keen interest in self-hypnosis, affirmations and self-help. ‘Her bedroom, her bathroom, her doors, are decorated with messages,’ George adds, ‘with carefully spaced sentences in felt-tip marker or ballpoint pen. They ring out ...”

“... a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989. At first glance it looks as if the reader gets a smaller return, a mere 15 years of history at a point when, on the face of it, nothing dramatic ...”