“... the preparation, purification, standardisation and marketing of insulin in a form suitable for self-administration by the afflicted patients. The entire episode brought to an end, with an appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as ...”

“... over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only break with history if you are already standing somewhere inside it, and the ...”

“... of Into Thin Air. One need not be a climber to learn from this admirably written book, a work of self-professed catharsis free of mawkishness, blame or a prurient interest in death. Human error and poor judgment played a decisive part in the disaster, but Krakauer sounds an important note of caution: in the midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is ...”

“... to reinvest their disparate memories in the newly re-established city. But by the 18th century the self-run city-state’s sovereign authority had passed to an absentee suzerain, Sultan Barqash of Zanzibar. In 1899 he leased Mogadishu to the Italians, who used it as a primary frontier settlement for several years, and later consolidated their colonial ...”

“... in’. As in the film, the scene expresses a refusal to be ground down, but in a grittier, less self-glorifying way. Getting your teeth knocked out (something Anderson plays up) can be glamorous: wearing dentures for the next forty years less so. The changing-room, with its naked truths about manliness, would feature prominently in Storey’s writing over ...”

“... gliding between his exotic physiognomy and his deeply conservative and anti-physical inner self, gives romanticism a strange name: Young England. Byron, embracing the hilarity and misjudgments of the erotic life, leaves England behind. Disraeli is no less interesting than Byron, but something of the emptiness of his sexual pose is illustrated in the ...”

“... it was ‘somewhat too composed ... for me to accept it as a direct cry from the heart’. This self-legitimising complaint sits rather oddly in Hamilton’s mouth, since he admits that his own letter to Salinger had been ‘completely disingenuous’, and that he’d deliberately phrased it in a way which he imagined his subject would ‘heartily ...”

“... work of the highest originality. It is typical of Wright’s need to present himself as uniquely self-made that he was cagey about admitting influences – Sullivan apart. Gill’s book is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 ...”

“... the past; simultaneously, he adopts a compensatory series of rhetorical ploys to erase or escape self-awareness, and salvage whatever dignity might be left to him. Age, then, is associated with self-deception and a circumlocutory evasiveness that is both escapist and curiously life-affirming, in that it helps the old to ...”

“... all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money.’ Amis goes to any length to remind us of our whole-hearted addiction to the ...”

“... Labour Party – as it was intended to. It was also a public admission that the Party had lost the self-confidence – the belief that, whatever the electorate thought, the future was on its side – which had sustained it from 1918 until the early Eighties. Mr Blair has done what Hugh Gaitskell failed to do and what no other Labour leader has even ...”

“... of good will’; ‘a little unpopular with the other boys, who regard him as rather boastful and self-important’; ‘I much admired his fighting spirit in the boxing’ (here too, perhaps, the dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a ...”

“... of financial and commercial control. It mattered because of the felt need to assert identity, self-worth and independence. It was not surprising that professionalism rapidly took hold, and that in 1895 a large body of Northern clubs seceded from the Rugby Football Union to establish what became the separate code of rugby league. The Southern clubs could ...”

“... Utopia is the most self-undermining of literary forms. If an ideal society can be portrayed only in the language of the present, it risks being betrayed as soon as we speak of it. Anything we can speak of must fall short of the otherness we desire. Utopias rebel against the unimaginativeness of the present, and in doing so find themselves simply reproducing it ...”

“... he discerned in his wife’s personality and the texture of their marriage. In equal parts self-deprecating and self-assured, emotional but not sentimental, intimate but not indiscreet, his voice is so trustworthy that it is impossible not to believe him. That’s why the few moments when he admits that the fog might ...”