“... Wilde’s second son – that kindled his interest. One of his first truly Cravanesque pieces, self-published in 1913, is a strange séance-like ‘interview’ with the long-dead Wilde, whom he also calls Sebastian after Wilde’s Parisian alias, Sebastian Melmoth. The piece veers between adulation and insult; Cravan is seduced by the possibility that he ...”

“... failed to use the period of extraordinary growth to create the basis for long-term, and more self-sustaining, development. Both Germany and Japan, after suffering military defeat, economic ruin and enemy occupation, became major economic powers within a long generation. A closer comparison is offered by strongly nationalist South Korea, which took ...”

“... to them. The families of the dead boys were represented by Maurizio Ribeiro, a very young, very self-important lawyer, never on time. He was suspicious of me because I asked about the evidence against Franco. He assumed I was on Franco’s side and was wary of my meeting the dead boy’s parents. Finally he agreed, but the meeting had to take place in the ...”

“... nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m sure it’s the tranquillity of the Vermeers rather than its small size, that makes it an untiring exhibition to see. And how small some of the pictures turn out to be, some of ...”

“... by the Lawrences (the document was duly processed in the incident room) and whether Gary Dobson, self-confessed ‘nigger-hater’, really did borrow a Bob Marley CD from the Acourts (not whether this provided him with an alibi on the night of the murder), rather than the sufficiency of evidence in the case. It is the lack of a sense of proportion ...”

“... and the lack of oversight. This created what the report called ‘a cabal of Special Branch self-interest that was fiercely resistant to any form of scrutiny … based on claims about a paramount need for secrecy’. Information that intelligence officers wanted kept quiet was routinely marked with the phrase ‘slow waltz’.The British government ...”

“... would be better but that ship has probably sailed). A TFR of 2 is also the cut-off for a self-sustaining population. In one case a sustainable future depends on not falling below 2 and in the other it depends on not going above it. But the climate number is essentially arbitrary: it has no significance in nature – nothing hangs on whether it’s ...”

“... have mostly been bypassed or abolished. Only in Oxford and Cambridge are versions of participatory self-government still occasionally effective; it may seem paradoxical that those two universities, usually seen as the most traditional and hierarchical, have the best claim to have preserved elements of internal democracy, but their peculiar history and ...”

“... the leading German-language journal of physics, whose editor was Max Planck. It is a remarkably self-assured piece of work, and Einstein was fully conscious of its importance. ‘The paper deals with radiation and the energy properties of light,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘and is very revolutionary.’ In it he attempts to explain certain experimental ...”

“... and Skoot’ out loud, and then falling asleep again until the nightguard of my conscious self woke me up for another interrogation: Do you remember? Yes, it’s Moot and Skoot. Eventually, I scribbled it down.How can something that feels so right, so true, in one dimension, amount to such nonsense in the other dimension? Whatever dreams offer ...”

“... and his violence, is animated by motivations more profound than power for its own sake, or self-interest. ‘His father had a mission, thought that he had a mission to save his people,’ the Russian journalist Andrei Babitski explains to me in his Prague apartment, next to a bottle of wine and a television set permanently tuned to the Chechnya Today ...”

“... industry can be obsessed with itself in the middle of somebody else’s war sometimes borders on self-parody,’ he harrumphs: here are these ‘big swinging dick’ foreign corrs, living it up in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn; here’s Mick, stuck in London without even a Pret sandwich on expenses. Imagine you were him and you landed Deichmann’s ...”

“... heartwarming. Helmut Thiemann, a communist Kapo who survived seven years in Buchenwald, wrote in a self-justificatory report to the party after the war that he had co-operated with the SS in selecting prisoners from the infirmary for murder in order to to keep his job there: ‘Because our comrades were worth more than all the others, we had to go along with ...”

“... a job, even, with a proper bed and a three-day weekend every second week: arrangements making for self-respect and mutual consideration. She took up a position, vigilant, just outside the door of her room. At the sound of feet coming up, she planned to retreat and draw the bolt. She listened for anything she could pick out, above or below the music’s ...”

“... whether or not she was joking. Was this a touch of gallows humour? Or was it a genuine whine of self-pity? Moore doesn’t spend much time trying to dissect her personality, on the grounds that what was most interesting about it was on the surface. But he does devote a chapter to recounting the failure of her enemies to understand her properly. By the ...”