"Minutes later roof doors opened up slowly, and a shape rose out of the van. It looked like a large satellite-receiving dish except the dish was square. It was pointing at them."

"He didn’t want reminding that their “watchful eyes” were “watching him”. CCTV cameras everywhere were bad enough without eyes looming at him from posters all over town."

"Of all the signs, the watch and report directives bothered him the most. It wasn’t enough that in Britain they were under more CCTV surveillance than anywhere else in the world, every individual was recruited to ‘do their bit’ as well."

"The voice came from loudspeakers positioned on a pole beneath the cameras."

"Turning the corner himself, he saw the reason. At the far end of the road, stretching its width, the statues of the square rising behind it, was a steel barrier."

"The moor looked afflicted with a weird skin disease; a localised eruption of boils on the site of an infection."

"This is the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, originally designed by Colonel Thomas Bearden and associates at Magnetic Energy Limited. This little beauty kicks out around three kilowatts, pollution-free, cost-free, potentially indefinitely given that there are no moving parts, and no limit to the energy itself. And if I want more power, I just connect another."

"He stood by a Hummer with ‘one weekend a month my ass!’ scrawled on cardboard in the windscreen, and looked out across the scrubby desert plain."

"I have nightmares about the children I’ve seen with horrific birth defects caused by the tonnes of uranium that’s been used in the war."

"The convoy pulled over at a checkpoint. Leading from it the inevitable halted queue of buses, cars, and taxis. Soldiers stalked around the zone. Compared to the natives the troops looked like a different species of animal."

"Two cops dragged a frantically struggling youth back toward the barrier. One of the cops had a gloved hand clamped over the youth’s nose and mouth."

"CS gas canisters arced through the air spitting sparks and gouting white clouds of gas. They hit the road beside the truck and skittered toward the marchers. Figures ran forward, snatched them up and threw them back."