“... his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the greatest of the ...”

“... slave-traders and opportunists of every sort followed in the wake of Roman armies, and it may have been Rome’s high-handed confiscation of part of the Pontic kingdom during the regency of Mithridates’ mother that first set him implacably against the rise of the western hegemon. From the beginning, Mithridates could play the typical local ...”

“... to meet them – thus engineering its exclusion. De Soto resigned from the UN soon afterwards. It may seem odd that other EU member states should have acquiesced so readily to the 2003 switch to a militarised solution, but Blair’s approach proved hard to resist. Schisms in the lead-up to the Iraq war had left the EU badly weakened. The instinct of men such ...”

“... part just me being a jackass.’ Shteyngart’s high school and college years sail by. It may be the old problem of the pages accumulating and the pressure to wrap the book up, or it may be that it’s easier to tell the stories of childhood, to find the narrative and the humour, and harder to say what happened just ...”

“... Activities Committee. Kuhle Wampe was initially banned, but after cuts it was released in May 1932 and attracted large audiences. In July that year the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. A month later, with a perverse sense of timing, Brecht borrowed money from his father to buy a house on the Ammersee in Bavaria. Any hope he had of an ...”

“... unknown,/as always the outcome is unknown’ – take that, Mr Rumsfeld) to the place we began. It may be to comic or grievous effect. It is an adventitious gallivanting movement across country that makes denser, bunched sense than any more rational or measured or predictable progress. It looks baroque, but actually it’s stringent – and vice versa. (I’ve ...”

“... In his annual letter to the shareholders of Amazon, he acknowledges that some of his decisions may seem inexplicable, but ‘it’s all about the long-term.’ To that end, he has donated $42 million to the construction of the Clock of the Long Now, which is supposed to tick for 10,000 years. His temporarily is not our temporarily. Bezos was born in 1964 ...”

“... describing myself here, obviously, and many others, but the point is that although the audience may have been the same, the readers came to him via different routes, and there were simply more of them. Also, usefully, and crucially, SF writers attract not only readers but actual fans, if not of the full-blown psychotic Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery ...”

“... a feminine relationship of jealous comparison might develop: Who spits better? To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it. I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself. From a torch ...”

“... Tsipras paid a visit to Kaisariani, the site of a massacre of communist partisans by the Nazis in May 1944. The privatisation of Piraeus by the Chinese shipping company Cosco ‘was to be reviewed in favour of the Greek people’. Plans to close refugee detention centres were announced. Illegal immigrants could no longer be randomly frisked by the ...”

“... zoology, the History of Animals – are the subject of Armand Marie Leroi’s new book. Aristotle may be most famous for his Physics and Politics, but his most voluminous writings were biological. Leroi celebrates him as the first truly scientific thinker, in a modern sense: the first to observe, describe and attempt to classify biology systematically, in all ...”

“... was perfectly orthodox: as the chief justice had put it, ‘there is no law whatsoever but may be dispensed with by the supreme lawgiver,’ and the laws were constitutionally the king’s laws. Although the Convention Parliament’s Declaration of Rights denounced the dispensing power as unlawful, the real objection was to the use James had made of ...”

“... what goes on in our heads knowable, legible and marketable. Facebook’s capacity for surveillance may be unparalleled, but its interest in measuring, monitoring and managing our feelings isn’t. Psychologists and behavioural economists gather data about feelings from a range of sources, online and off, in an effort to understand and better predict people’s ...”

“... major cities would end up underwater. And we aren’t looking at a multigenerational timescale: we may see a four-degree rise over the next sixty years. ‘The science around four degrees keeps moving,’ Marshall notes, ‘usually in the direction of greater pessimism.’ What explains the gulf between what we know about these potential terrors and what we ...”

“... East’s complexities. ‘Be careful,’ their argument goes, ‘when you reach Syria or Iraq you may end up killing Muslims.’ True enough, but it’s hardly a clarion call. Obama and Cameron have condemned the Islamic State’s barbarity but – in contrast to the rhetoric of Bush and Blair – they haven’t spoken passionately about the virtues of the ...”