This was the worst-looking house on the street. Why had he taken it on? He'd told her that he was planning to do most of the renovation work himself.

Mrs. Michael turned out to be a ravenous, fast-fading woman in a slashed skirt and a low blouse over an unappetising chest. While her husband did things in his shed, where he appeared to live, Pym inexpertly mixed the Yorkshire pudding and fought off her embraces...

A tracksuited man with a face like a wolf is running a jagged path from copse to copse.

Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia.