“... 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 ...”

“... chastened essays for Stedman Jones, it is impossible not to find the intellectual energy and even self-importance of these pieces refreshing. I can’t share Mary Poovey’s belief that Wall Street’s recurrent financial crises will be overcome only when we (whoever ‘we’ are) ‘understand that there is a relationship between the stories people tell ...”

“... one tenth of the actual flow rate and was dismissed in the US media as another of Hayward’s self-serving lies. Bergin, however, reports that BP’s engineers built the 5000-barrel estimate into their models when attempting to cap the spill. In his analysis, this mistake prolonged the spill by as much as a month, an indication of how unprepared BP was to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... people use money to get power and power to get money. The country is ruled by a narrow, self-serving elite who go through the motions of holding elections and transferring power. No one is fooled. When Putin moves from the office of president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just out one door ...”

“... His brother Gianfranco, currently an undersecretary in Enrico Letta’s administration and a self-confessed cocaine user (not a crime in Italy), once attracted criticism for deploring the naming of Palermo’s airport after Falcone and Borsellino, suggesting instead Archimedes of Syracuse. How can the honoured society exist at all? One obvious reason is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... much more than You or Him.’ He should have listened. The great 19th-century novels here become self-help books to guide a worried young man around the world of emotions and family. We all start off reading books as if they contained the secrets of our life, and later come to see that their greatness lies in the fact that they do no such thing. It’s hard ...”

“... playing, without anyone noticing.’ Perhaps this first band was a way of establishing her musical self while concealing it at the same time.Her next step was to form her own band, the Marine Girls, in the summer of 1980 with some friends from school. Within weeks they’d made a tape on a borrowed four-track recorder and funded fifty copies through Saturday ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”