“... Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t realised he had been a coroner. So: they did, after all, have something in common. They both had ...”

“... house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and self-absorbed as usual, was beheading a litter of puppies with unexpectedly muscular and adult twists of her slender arms. Her cap of golden hair shone like burnished auburn on her head.’ Bradbury does capture something. Occasional whiffs of Walter ...”

“... taken over from locomotives as Platonov’s favourite metaphor. The upbeat mood and recovering self-confidence remains dominant in his wartime letters, even in the face of his son’s death in Ufa in January 1943. Platonov had been rehabilitated as a writer, at least for the time being, publishing sketches of army life and planning larger-scale work when ...”

“... it – so that at some point its benefits are undone by the damage to human mental capacities and self-esteem. Capitalists insisted that the waste of a few generations in the living hell of the factories of Manchester was a necessary sacrifice to secure a better future for all. But where does the sacrifice end if capitalism’s imperative is the endless ...”

“... into her. She will nearly bite my fingers to get at an eclair. And there are flashes of her old self still. We watched Four Weddings and a Funeral together recently, and she giggled when Rowan Atkinson called on ‘the father, the son and the holy goat’. (That line is funny.) Last Mothers’ Day, just as I was leaving for London, she called out ...”

“... of the few animals – along with great apes, dolphins and elephants – able to pass the mirror self-recognition test. If you mark a pigeon’s wing and let it look in a mirror it will try to remove the mark, realising that what it sees is a reflected image of its own body. Pigeons can recognise video footage of themselves shown with a five-second delay ...”

“... they represent.’ An ideal narrative is one that doesn’t need to describe a world: it’s a self-contained system. But the version of the story that is told in The Idiot ends in disaster! All the characters are happily married off, and gaze into one another’s eyes as a solar eclipse becomes visible in the Siberian east. Selin is appalled. That sort of ...”

“... launched, intensifying after Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to Britain on a hare-brained, self-appointed peace mission. After learning that Hess had consulted an astrologer before his act of rebellion, Hitler approved an Action against Occult Doctrines and So-Called Occult Sciences, known as the Hess Action. Hundreds of individuals were arrested and ...”

“... by conspiracy theories, the scapegoating of minorities and fanfares of purportedly democratic self-congratulation. In Turkey Erdoğan has made cunning use of actual and threatened military coups against his regime to subvert democracy, in the name of democracy.* The seemingly quotidian category of democracy, so widely recognised that it seems to need no ...”

“... flight by heavier-than-air machines. He wanted Nadar’s help, impressed with his knack for self-promotion. Nadar needed no persuasion: he later wrote that he had been ‘brooding’ on the idea for years: ‘It seized me the way the Devil from Hell seized people in the Middle Ages.’ Along with Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt, a rich enthusiast who ...”

“... to be part of the EU, the commitments that must be shared for it to endure and those that risk its self-destruction. They must also decide how the EU will engage with an outside world defined by conflict, not least that generated by the legacies of European involvement in the Middle ...”

“... a race!’ In my mind’s eye, and possibly in Macaulay’s, is Tamara de Lempicka’s art deco self-portrait of 1925 showing her red-lipped and sultry-eyed at the wheel of a green Bugatti. Macaulay, however, has only an elderly Morris. She reflects that she is often stuck in traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a ...”

“... prison.The circumstances surrounding Rwigyema’s death are less clear. A ‘slim, smooth-skinned, self-deprecating Hector’, he was admired by his men for his ‘almost suicidal courage’ and his kindness – he would argue for mercy when Kagame was out for blood. A friend who went with him to a football match in Kampala remembers the reception when he ...”

“... If I one day win the Nobel, it could not confer a greater distinction.Miette was back to her usual self a week later, but I had developed a low-grade fever. My head ached, my neck, my back. My eyes ached in their orbits and streamed tears whenever I tried to read or watch television. My mouth tasted like a foreign penny. ‘You reek,’ I mentioned to Jason ...”

“... that Rick will get into college. Josie’s father agrees to help Klara in a quixotic act of self-sacrificial environmental sabotage, though knowing his fascist leanings we may doubt his motives. But despite Klara’s faith, and despite her good works, the Sun doesn’t answer her prayers. Well, of course not, you think. But then there is a kind of ...”