“... far from flawless, almost effortlessly distinctive and intelligent; and while his third, the self-consciously terse, thrillerish Zanzibar, was less impressive, it is with Turbulence, his first book since his appointment as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007, that real difficulties begin. The distinctive blurs into the ...”

“... practised something like this detonation of historical pain in the service of intense and unseemly self-regard, and both were attacked for it. Like them, Seidel has anticipated his detractors. He is only too aware that he is ‘pretending’ to eat broken glass, that he will never be hacked to pieces, as in the opening of ‘Barbados’, from Ooga-Booga, which ...”

“... economy? Why, for example, is a pack of cigarettes 24 cents and not 23 or 25? The strategically self-deprecating guide has no answer but the idea churns through Spufford’s chronicle. Six chapters and three years later, Galina’s ex, now a minor member of the regional Party apparatus in the southern city of Novocherkassk, has his own rude ...”

“... the long, slow decline, in which the villain continues to dream of greatness because he is so self-obsessed he can’t understand that the game was up long ago. Roy Hattersley has rightly drawn praise for this portrait: he is better able than most to understand how powerful a parliamentary presence someone of Lloyd George’s rhetorical gifts could be ...”

“... in much the same way as they abuse women, but the system itself hasn’t crumbled; these are self-contained viruses and society can still be saved. In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the last book in the trilogy, Larsson explains in great detail exactly how the Section – the criminal agency at the centre of things – was formed, what its aims ...”

“... Jewish background was important to Warburg’s character, so too was the combination of idealism, self-criticism and ‘south German puritanism’ that were instilled into him by his devoted but severe mother and by his strict Protestant education. These influences help explain why he remained in many ways an atypical banker. He had hoped for a career in ...”

“... a small minority all over the Greek world, literally hundreds of local oracles emerged, as well as self-styled experts (chrêsmologoi) in interpreting the ambiguities, obscurities and riddles of what purported to be divine messages. As Heraclitus, cited by Plutarch, remarked: ‘The lord whose shrine is at Delphi neither states nor conceals, but signs ...”

“... the Israelis recognised the organisation they would somehow also be recognising its programme of self-determination. The thinking is abstract: it takes no account of the shifting legal ground over which negotiations are conducted, and fails to anticipate the other side’s legal case, which makes it unable to respond adequately. At a meeting of the ...”

“... to an expectation that those who profess a religion should believe in its tenets. This now seems self-evident, but it was not perhaps so generally assumed in the past, when going to church was a social custom. It would have been anachronistic to ask an 18th-century bishop if he believed in God: churchmen contended over theological issues, but basic belief ...”

“... is sometimes laboured indeed,’ and this seems just right. But there is worry and energy and self-parody in the labour too. Nabokov rarely mentions Véra’s condition, or asks about it. He tells her how much he loves her, wishes she would write more, and insistently describes the clothes he has on, as if he were a model or a disguise artist: ‘I am ...”

“... you can imagine him in a film with Richard Wattis – but his virtues shine out in our age of self-indulgence, celebrity and spin. Jago records how, on the way to the Lords in later life, Attlee was accosted by a fellow passenger: ‘Good Lord! Do people ever tell you that you are the spitting image of Clement Attlee?’ ‘Frequently,’ Attlee ...”

“... Roman tombs have given us the first named face in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The face belonged to Marcus Favonius Facilis, a centurion of the XXth Legion, and was carved, along with an inscription, on the elaborate statue that once sheltered his ashes. The statue was found in Colchester. De la Bédoyère’s book ...”

“... countries? The end of a truce last year between the two most powerful Salvadoran maras – self-repatriating gangs originating in the US – is responsible for some of this increase. The region as a whole is racked by violence and ruled by repressive regimes. Washington has sponsored one military coup after another. George Kennan sketched out the ...”

“... architecture or sign of city life. We are left with a truly nude figure, relaxed if slightly self-conscious, like a beautiful model posing, and yet the stabilising tree stump and base return us to the realm of sculpture. Neither a malevolent idol nor a dutiful civic emblem, this figure lives in the indeterminacy of drawing, both sculpture and living ...”

“... as a ‘celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit’. It’s the last of these conditions that Pluto and Eris don’t satisfy, so the IAU invented a ...”