“... such as Iran, Mexico or Venezuela were zones of unionisation, democratic activism and sovereign self-assertion. Given the geopolitics of the Middle East, the prominence of Opec and the power of the oil lobby in the US, it isn’t surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant ...”

“... revolutionary diplomats, the chief target of the hostage takers, describing Afrouz as ‘a sleek, self-satisfied opportunist with a paunch’. The deputy press attaché, Abbas Lavasani, who was to be shot in the head and his body dumped outside the embassy door, thereby precipitating the SAS assault, is dismissed as a ‘spy’ and ‘fundamentalist ...”

“... and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today. It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and ...”

“... the transgressive power and chilly stylishness of all this (nor how close it often sails to self-parody). But it seems at least as much a ‘private vocabulary of symbols drawn … from the writer’s mind’ as it is a case of ‘analysing external fictions’. What isn’t immediately clear is whether those two ways of thinking about the novel can be ...”

“... tools of measurement, models or paradigms, and laws. The first and third of these are more or less self-evident: one set of things we call ‘rulers’ provide consistent measurements of lines, while the other, lawmakers, impose consistency in the judgment of behaviour. Both display and encourage what we call ‘regularity’. But the second of these three ...”

“... One motivation was to persuade bankers that a Labour government would be sensible, in the City’s self-interested terms, which essentially meant it wouldn’t impose new regulations on the banks’ ever riskier activities. Brown thought the financial sector was crucial to economic growth, and to the extra tax revenue New Labour would need to reduce poverty ...”

“... three million files, released on 30 January, revealed a series of emails from Mandelson seeking self-advancement through Epstein’s devices, grubbing for cash to pay for his partner to take a course in osteopathy, and passing confidential government material to Epstein and his banker associates. This second wave of documents, which made clear that his ...”

“... is a thief trafficking in breath’), political and geopolitical commentary, and oddly intimate self-exposure, with a terrifying appendix called ‘Reining in the Arctic’. Alastair Campbell blurbs it as ‘a proper piece of journalism’ – which says it all, since the book flatters security wonks without disturbing anyone’s received wisdom. It is ...”

“... years ago the basic information-encoding chemical molecules of life formed, and somehow came to be self-replicating. DNA, or more likely RNA, entered a life-sustaining loop of reproducing itself, and then, through random iteration, began to make the proteins that do its bidding. Now it’s established that proteins can themselves transmit information, why ...”

“... the writer Otto Perl, prompted by the plight of men wounded in the First World War, founded the Self-Help League of the Physically Handicapped (Selbsthilfebund der Körperbehinderten). Perl, who suffered from a stiffness of the limbs bordering on paralysis, was confined to a series of institutions but still managed in 1926 to publish a history of disabled ...”

“... used not for spectacle but camouflage. Resistance to the Roman state is also clear: we hear about self-identified Romans dressed by pirates in full official regalia before being invited to climb a ladder down into the sea. In return, pirates were subject to especially gruesome state punishments, chained up alive or displayed as corpses on the coast in ‘a ...”

“... left branch bundle of his heart – and still describing himself to the doctors and nurses as a self-taught nutritionist. I knew he would try out the tea for a week and then decide it was oestrogenic.At my age you need all the testosterone you can get, he said. Does he know there is a time when he won’t have ANY testosterone? Jason asked on the drive ...”

“... with one side or the other faced clear choices, and there were very few of these.’ Fear was self-perpetuating, and only once its overriding cause – the political vacuum at the top – was removed, could the wars end. It was not until 1509, when the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was unquestioningly succeeded by the second, Henry VIII, that the country ...”

“... end in flattish idiom). As in Enzensberger, an Eliotic note is struck, combining Prufrockian self-depreciation and the Hollow Men’s sense of an ending. But the poem is not mannered in the way this might suggest, and its feeling is well-described in Johnston’s own words: ‘Like Paulinus, I register the end of Empire without expressing either joy or ...”

“... it clear just how much Colin and Mary invited their doom (even, in the brutally superstitious and self-protecting phrase of modern city-life, ‘asked for it’), one answer would be that it is of the nature of tragedy that it will not abide this question. ‘We didn’t exactly plan to come, but it wasn’t completely accidental either.’ Did King Lear ...”