“... be too severe to say that most thrillers aren’t worth reading because it’s in their nature to self-destruct, imploding with their terminal expositions of motive, means and opportunity. It’s true that, once the problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger ...”

“... marks a rather drastic switch from the romantic to the classical, crediting Galen with a fussy, self-important manner and a weakness for dry Latin mottoes – Lux veritatis is the title of the final chapter, in which Cassius informs Galen that he intends to suppress most of what he has heard. We certainly do not warm to any of Prantera’s main characters ...”

“... had been overdue. Returning to duty in 1976, Perkins found his old arguments for Aboriginal self-sufficiency consistent with the thinking of his new Liberal minister. The Aboriginal Development Commission, created in 1980, with Perkins as its first chair, was to invest a capital fund so as to create an independent revenue, meanwhile spending a general ...”

“... invasion, to tame and cultivate their continent for fruitful use, and to evolve systems of self-government in which, however labelled, the accountability which gives legitimacy to rulers was a decisive component. Their societies functioned by principles of democratic accountability: wherever these failed, so did the systems in place. These principles ...”

“... we are told, a real possibility. Consider, for example, Eric Drexler’s tiny single-cell-scale self-replicating machines, the ultimate end of ‘nanotechnology’. These would be ideal for sorting through frost-bitten cells, molecule by molecule, putting them back into working order, and, maybe, adding new ones to make a new body (age of your choice) as ...”

“... the state, though always within the popular sovereignty of the nation. The People were one. It was self-evident to him that social categories, provinces, linguistic groups and particularisms of any kind had to be either unhealthy artifices or anachronistic survivals: nothing could stand between the French citizen and the French state, least of all the ...”

“... and linguistic refinements available to the Cambridge male graduate. The interpolated, arty, self-pitying prose of Roger is there partly because it provides an illuminating contrast with Anna’s, whose favourite reading (The Thorn Birds, The Far Pavilions) may be held to have debased her sensibility but has no effect whatever on her sensible way of ...”

“... and the disintegration of the unified character with their overview, their version of unity (a self-mocking unity, full of pratfalls but nonetheless reassuring). In this novel humour is not the medium in which everything is suspended, it’s intermittent and not to be relied on, or possibly so black it’s hard to recognise. Jenny Diski’s oeuvre to date ...”

“... rather than eloquent. She never breaks out of the prefabricated language of TV commercials and self-help manuals that has surrounded her all her life. Her dead husband Marvin is, in her words, ‘permanently defunct in the living department’. The effect of removing Marvin from the living department and disposing of his remains in the gardening department ...”

“... from the memorandum whether Kurchatov knew in July 1943 about Fermi’s success in achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction in a uranium graphite pile in Chicago the previous December’ – a much more restrained formulation. But then it was extremely improbable that Soviet espionage, which was already providing Moscow with a great deal of detail, would ...”

“... modern cities, the Manchester of the late Middle Ages, Florence. Her brothers are merchants, ‘self-retired/In hungry pride and gainful cowardice’, ‘ledgermen’ who stay at home. Yet slaves sweated for them ‘In torched mines and noisy factories’ and For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,      And went all naked to the hungry shark; For ...”

“... teachers; and his mother’s family were highly respectable Christian men and women, ‘self-righteous’ non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-gamblers. It is a point of Gates’s memoir that despite national social upheaval in the Sixties, Piedmont coloured did not lose their identities and sense of worth; the boy Skip was made to feel loved at all ...”

“... then been given the special status of literary consultant. While the other teachers taught mime, self-healing, massage, Tai-Chi and wind-surfing in groups, beginning at 7 a.m., Susan saw aspiring writers one at a time in the café on the beach, where she sat in a stately way sipping Greek coffee. She seemed to have thought deeply about writing, how it ...”

“... in 1898, P.B. transformed himself by means of cosmetic surgery, extensive travel and total self-conviction into an advocate and ‘adept’ of Indian mystical thought and a self-styled PhD in Eastern philosophy – part of his studies took place, if that’s the right term, at ‘Astral University’. In his heyday ...”

“... was, with Story consigned to the past tense only in a couple of passages at the end. Story was a self-made and largely self-taught writer. His father was killed on the Western Front in 1918, when Jack was one. His mother was supposed to be descended from a noble family. There are recurring allusions to her in the ...”