“... and the ground in Yellowstone has risen by as much as 70 centimetres in the past century; this may or may not be lava building up. But the evidence is not always easy to interpret. DNA sequencing shows that leguminous plants in the Horn of Africa are more closely related to those living in similar climates in the ...”

“... there is ice hockey, a second home by a lake, and French spoken. The cultural life of a family may be so self-contained and self-referential that it can be transplanted into another continent and the difference will scarcely show. The five Weiss siblings, three boys and two girls, are bright, witty, full of promise. The precise flavour of their ...”

“... up the collection hoping for documentary evidence of the sort found in the best oral histories may come away thinking that the defining characteristic of America is the shaggy dog story. Too often, reading this book feels like being trapped by boring uncles at a Thanksgiving dinner table. That’s not to suggest that a reader can’t, with a certain amount ...”

“... allow for a universe which works in ways that are obscure and unfair. But the possibility that man may try to make himself immune to God is allowed into the novels with equal potency. One of his early novels, In the Winter Dark (1988), dwells chillingly on what happens when it is too late to atone. A straightforward Christian answer rarely gets a free run in ...”

“... Hamish Malahide, a student of Gödel and Heisenberg who takes a more sanguine view: ‘There may be uncertainties but don’t you think it’s better to live in the full knowledge of this than go on looking for illusory “truths” that can never exist?’ Whatever the tenor, though, the song remains the same. Boyd’s books are rambling, lucid, genial ...”

“... would like to have. Each of the women closest to him – L, his friend and the hotel cook; May, his daughter-in-law and dogsbody; Heed, his widow; Christine, his granddaughter – has her own version of the man, and fights to claim him as her own. But we see him chiefly through the eyes of Heed and Christine, who live as enemies in his house. A ...”

“... self-assertiveness which he held, following Emerson, to be everyman’s potential. ‘The humblest may say: "To respect myself, to develop myself – this is my true duty in life.”’ It is difficult now to grasp how revolutionary this message was in 1859, when for generations ‘duty’ had been defined almost solely in relation to others, principally ...”

“... that has so maddened many reviewers. On the face of it, a list of quoted sources that one may or may not have spotted in the text looks like a calculated affront to the average reader. In fact – and this might not improve matters for some – the ploy and the precise opening words of the postscript are borrowed ...”

“... domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history. It may now be the exception in literary and specialist journalism, but at the start of the 19th century it was pretty much the rule – to the extent that France in 1850 legislated to forbid the publication of unsigned articles on philosophical, political and ...”

“... bourses, took a hit, and the spread between German and Italian bonds grew by a few points. It may yet turn out that a more significant date than 4 March 2018 will be 31 October 2019, when Italy’s most powerful man, Mario Draghi, steps down as president of the European Central Bank. In July 2012, Draghi said the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’ to ...”

“... involve eldritch Lovecraftian detail about metempsychosis (at one point the novel intimates there may be some ‘transmigration of souls’ at work between Lovecraft, Barlow, Spinks and Charlie), but the horror turns out to be historically real: the concentration camp at Belsen, which Spinks claims to have visited as an American soldier, before improbably ...”

“... more than the ‘free’ bright colour of Parisian painting. Chagall travelled to Paris in May 1911 and ended up living in a studio at La Ruche (‘the beehive’), a dilapidated, circular establishment divided into wedge-shaped studios for artists and writers, wives and lovers, memorably described by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine as a ‘sinister wheel ...”

“... California, a surfer’s paradise that doubles as a nursery for juvenile great whites, which may be immature, but are nonetheless huge and lethal predators. (Indeed, their immaturity is part of the issue: they’re deeply curious, and don’t know yet that there is better prey than human beings.) I also sometimes surf in Northern California, at a reef ...”

“... wines, or bad wines mixed with white of egg, honey and other sweetening matter.’ Honey and egg may have vanished from the adulteration of wine, but the expertise required of a wine expert is not now so different. Wine adulteration has never completely disappeared. Eleven years after the Widow Bourne opened her shop on St James’s Street, Addison wrote in ...”

“... commonplace that Cézanne and Monet were the two prophets of modern painting. Renoir, it was said, may have been a radical early on, but after the mid-1880s his imagery grew sentimental, his style soft and blowsy. We can no longer imagine how it occurred to the pianist Misia Sert to explain Stravinsky to Renoir by saying, ‘He is in music what you are in ...”