“... griffin-robbing Arimaspians included, that Caesar in particular had an evident agenda of imperial self-justification, and that some of the things reported of druids are not very different from the behaviour of Roman haruspices. As for the Celtic evidence, none of it, he believes, can plausibly be explained as genuinely surviving from the Roman or pre-Roman ...”

“... instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got older) while trying to prove (on extremely slight grounds) his right to the title Baron Chandos of Sudeley. The rest ...”

“... think it was quite natural. It is easy to think of general reasons: new threats, loss of national self-confidence, the decline of (political) liberalism and so on. Another was undoubtedly an ‘empire strikes back’ effect: values and methods developed in the more authoritarian environments of Britain’s colonies coming home to roost. (A high proportion of ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... novelist Mary Keene told him she was pregnant with their child, he wrote her a characteristically self-serving letter in which a steely abnegation of responsibility came wrapped in the flannel of warm concern. He said that he hoped that once the baby ceased to be too preoccupying they would meet again, adding: ‘Being yours I shall love it and I only hope it ...”

“... The Ratliff stuff, which teeters between dark comedy and a more sympathetic depiction of redneck self-contempt, seems to belong in a novel by a figure like Barry Hannah, who briefly taught Tartt at the University of Mississippi, though it’s done without Hannah’s flair for loopy satire. Harriet, on the other hand, is decked out with tropes from ...”

“... about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be self-generating: Razorfish, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo! There was a strange connection during that boom between whimsy and greed, as if the internet had brought about a completely innocent, even goofy way of becoming fantastically rich. A popular trade magazine for ...”

“... the Lost Love Letters, love is ‘a certain power of the soul, neither existing through itself nor self-contained, but always pouring itself into another with a kind of appetite and desire, willing to become one with the other so that, from two different wills, one single thing may be produced without difference.’ This sounds like the sort of definition ...”

“... What this means is that it has high unemployment and high long-term unemployment specifically. Self-employed people are rare, business insolvencies are high and a very large number of people have no qualifications. Four in every ten jobs are in the public sector – the NHS, local government and education. People die younger here than in almost any other ...”

“... are laid. The logic is simple and compelling: as the banner hoisted over one of the yurts in a self-declared new neighbouhood put it in defiant capitals, ‘The master of the land is the people!’ The new mayor of Bishkek tried to calm the crowd of zakhvatchiki last week, promising that land would only be allocated ‘according to the law’. But ...”

“... ignorance, or amnesia.’ In The Pregnant Widow, Amis tries very hard to get beyond the inflated self-regard that has got in the way of his recent attempts at geopolitical thinking. Except that it always seems to ping out somewhere else. There’s a particularly odd bit in the present novel where Amis reprises one of the pieces collected in The Second Plane ...”

“... of her underwear; she followed some light instinctive purpose, immune to the cautious gravity of self-questioning … Apart from parents and doctors, Mary had never stood naked before anyone in her life. She had been so used to think of herself in the diminutive, her own body reflected back through the loving eyes of those who still viewed her as a ...”

“... cosmogonies, myths, history and novels. It presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines, and not one which has been sent sprawling before us, for us to take or leave (jeté, étalé, offert). Behind the preterite there always lurks a demiurge, a God or a reciter. The world is not unexplained since it is ...”

“... take their place as allies, until they too became enemies. All this timely betrayal, bribery and self-interest sustained the Byzantine Empire. ‘Gratitude,’ Luttwak writes, ‘is not a virtue in strategy.’ We know that Byzantine soldiers collected information about enemy tactics and weapons, and envoys gave full accounts of the people they ...”

“... the other in the rational French of Calvinism, full of rhetorical questions and their self-evident answers that gave an illusion of argument rather than the substance. The region also preserved some local laws, not least to do with hunting, which were at odds with France’s national legal code, and all the more fiercely protected for that. More ...”