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“... of Southern California’s autumn mini-hurricanes, the Santa Anas. In October 1991, they turned a small grass fire near the Caldecott Tunnel in the Oakland Hills into an inferno that killed 25 people and destroyed nearly four thousand homes and apartments. In a post-mortem on the Tunnel Fire, the historian ...”

“... a heist movie, but it’s too slow for the genre, and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the ...”

“... have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a spot just outside the Kerrera marina, so it was in full ...”

“... pattern of avalanches is also important. Unsurprisingly, there will be fewer large ones than small ones, but Bak claims that the distribution will obey a theoretically significant ‘power law’, the simplest form of which would have the number of avalanches inversely proportional to their size. Bak discerns this pattern of behaviour emerging from ...”

“... The story is to be continued, presumably, but I can’t see this ‘Dance ...’ catching on. Stephen Wall’s first novel Double Lives is a strange, enfolded book, similar to Motion’s in its use of layering but considerably more subtle in the way it yields up its narrative key. It takes quite some time – nearly the whole book, in fact – for the ...”

“... of civic pride, its construction was often characterised by corruption, parsimony, ineptitude, small-mindedness, infirmity of purpose and division of opinion. Architects had to be strong-willed to stay the course and some, like Hansom, who was bankrupted by the building of Birmingham town hall, lacked the necessary force of character. Only the luckiest and ...”

“... cargoes); it is still possible to work aloft as a topman, encountering many of the same dangers as Stephen Taylor’s subjects did – but few of those who write about seamen have ever gone aloft on a dirty night to lay out on a yard and hand sail. There is at least one modern authority (Sam Willis) who deliberately went to sea in square rig to learn the trade ...”

“... Crown’s evidence without compromise but equally without insult or injury. There are others – a small but prominent minority – who either cannot or will not do so, and who breach the Bar’s Code of Conduct, which forbids the asking of questions that merely vilify or annoy. With these the trial judge has a Herculean task in preventing the humiliation and ...”

“... that Darwinian competition will bring market society to ‘the point when all we have left is a small handful of especially talented people who can create and operate the newer technologies’. The identity of the ‘we’ in this phrase is worth pondering. The deregulation campaign of which he was such a prominent cheerleader may have been only a precursor ...”

“... by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of everyday Soviet life, which, Stephen Cohen maintains in his interesting volume of essays, put one in mind of a Third World state rather than a modern super-power. ‘My father lives in the skies,’ Gromyko’s daughter once told Shevchenko. ‘For twenty-five years he has not set foot on ...”

“... who were his on-off lovers, sitting or dancing at tavernas. The mood was playful. Craxton liked small jokes, hiding the date of a painting in the label on a bottle of beer, or turning his signature into part of the pattern on a cigarette packet. His art had become a quest for colour, the imagery increasingly abstract, brightening into ‘dazzling ...”

“... then the headlines started coming: the highest BNP vote in the country; the attempted hanging of a small boy; a 7 July bomber from Lees Holm. Each a surprise, and yet not. My Yorkshireness was never straightforward. I was born in Sunderland; my family moved to Dewsbury six months later, but that means nothing in the eyes of true tykes or – until they relaxed ...”

“... In 2011, in order to show off the ridiculousness of campaign finance laws, the comedian Stephen Colbert got approval from the Federal Election Commission to form his own SuperPac (Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow), raised more than a million dollars from his fans, declared he was running for president of the United States of South ...”

“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... for everyday survival to be even harder for most people than it had been in the past. Stephen Lovell’s choice of the dacha as a prism through which to look at the changes in Russian society is inspired. His book is not light reading: the story is complex and he has done a lot of research (if readers want to try something less demanding ...”