“... out in the memoir, which tells relatively little of her story, not only because it was written in self-defence but also because she lived another 24 eventful years after it was published. Mazarin died shortly after Hortense’s marriage, leaving her – or rather her husband – not only almost all of his fabulous wealth and property, but also his ...”

“... absence. Like Roller, Appia wanted his designs to act as a direct emanation of the music. But this self-effacing attitude to her husband’s work failed to impress Cosima, who told Appia’s somewhat improbable advocate Houston Stewart Chamberlain that his sketches reminded her ‘only of the pictures that the explorer Nansen had brought back from the North ...”

“... compromising the moral standing of the democratic state. Then, helpfully, the monarchy self-destructed: King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah was killed in a massacre at the royal palace in 2001, supposedly by his son. So addled was the Royal State Council that they named the son, comatose with a bullet to the head at the end of the killing spree, the next ...”

“... something desirable and rewarding in and for itself, a means towards human happiness, dignity and self-fulfilment, shaping a world in which ‘the idle are the only wretched.’ This dialectical pattern is traced in most of the chapters. The discussion of military prowess as an aspiration begins by outlining the aristocratic ideal which saw physical courage ...”

“... 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 ...”