“... living in the former Soviet states – all this has been absorbed and contained. The famed and self-advertised virtue of the Russians – their doleful capacity to take punishment and carry on – would appear to be borne out. The market creeps up, not just on the Congress but on every citizen’s life. It is a very ugly and disruptive process. It breaks ...”

“... they will affect our reading in ways that we can do nothing about. Only if we are philosophically self-conscious do we have a chance of successfully measuring the distance between ourselves and ancient and Medieval thinkers. Coleman brings some very heavy assumptions to her task. Unfortunately they get in the way of her scrutinising her own philosophical ...”

“... in which they can make unusual sense, a medium which bears them delightedly up, confers on them a self-disciplined freedom that can astonish the land-bound observer. These unoriginal reflections arise from a reading of Rose Tremain’s new novel. In the opinion of the Booker judges there are at least six recently published novels better than this one, and if ...”

“... on a selective myth of the debacle that minimised its futility and highlighted its glorious self-sacrifices? And how was that myth sustained, and for how long, and how did it come to be revised? Behind all the public pageantry and nostalgia for past heroism, of which Moorhouse is a cravenly enthusiastic supporter, was there anything Bury was ashamed of ...”

“... 88 of the Desert War had the same sort of fearsome reputation, as well as being lethal in fact.) A self-educated monarch of the Late Renaissance, Gustavus had studied the rediscovered military treatises of Vegetius and Leo the Isaurian, and he was quite capable of taking a tip or two from the warfare of the ancients. After he was killed winning the battle of ...”

“... Indigo is a family history: but the new work is far more ambitious. It combines a remarkably self-assured interweaving of realism, romance and fantasy with a political and moral urgency that were merely hinted at in the author’s earlier writing. Indigo boldly enters such traditionally masculine domains as the imperialist adventure tale, the ‘first ...”

“... the filth of the Madelonnettes prison; he was let out after only 48 hours, but his indestructible self-confidence, his delight in life, died in the cell. Mme Roland went to the guillotine on 1 November, and her husband killed himself in hiding. Two weeks later, Chamfort was told that he was to be rearrested. A hideous suicide attempt followed, in which he ...”

“... be dismissed with ignominy from the Imperial service. It was a shattering blow to his honour and self-esteem from which he never fully recovered, although it also had the liberating effect of allowing the man of arms to dedicate himself full-time to his other vocation, the pursuit of letters. Ever since he first set eyes on it, Marsigli had been fascinated ...”

“... perhaps Mediterranean), but this now-common noun turns out to have started life as an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Interpol, too, is an abbreviation (for International Criminal Police Commission), and why it took from its founding in 1923 to the early Fifties to get itself into the OED is one of those mysteries that its own ...”

“... to alter it by virtue of some sort of inertia. He doesn’t endorse the various theories of a self-compensating effect in human interactions with technology, such as the Conservation of Catastrophe, which suggests that things go wrong about as often, no matter what changes, or ‘risk homeostasis’, which argues that we habitually maintain risk at a ...”

“... the first time. A more or less trivial character study of two silly American females as seen by a self-satisfied, dense European sophisticate turns into a philosophical meditation about the vanity (Vane) of human denials of supernatural survival. One is sent back to more than this story. One is sent back to all of Nabokov’s best fiction, to reread it for ...”

“... as Bohr demonstrated, Einstein was wrong and Bohr was finally able to persuade him of the self-consistency of the quantum description of events when it is correctly and fully applied. In his dealings with Einstein, and in his discussions with other physicists, one is struck by Bohr’s intuition and speed of thought in unfamiliar territory. Some found ...”

“... to what is considered politically correct in arts faculties. But other aspects of Jenkyns’s self-assurance are more troubling. It comes as a shock to encounter the assumptions behind his generalising characterisations of national identity, as he speculates on whether ‘the British are by temper more empirical, less theoretical than the Germans.’ This ...”

“... there is some melancholy comment on the hazards of upper-middle-class life, made entirely without self-pity. Indeed, forged in that cruel fire, the stepsons emerge with a remarkable sense of purpose and humanity. It would be presumptuous to ask whether the price was too great. Farewell Sidonia also recounts a child’s life, that of a Gypsy child found ...”

“... Pell’s remarkable portrait, painted by the American artist in 1890, depicts an independent, self-contained and far from lustful woman. The performance Vision of Salome by the Canadian dancer Maud Allan shocked audiences in music halls throughout Europe a decade later with its ‘feminist and subversive’ mood. Much closer to the current Viennese ...”