“... the shacks and tents of Ein-Husub’ near the Jordanian border. Tlallim is a desert tramp, a self-styled (Russian Jewish) nomad who lives out of the back of a beat-up jeep. He immediately divines what Yonatan is up to, guessing every detail of his plan to steal across the border by night into Jordan and visit the ruined city of Petra. And he sees the ...”

“... by the use of experiments to authorise scientific theories: for experiments were the preserve of a self-appointed group of professionals whose claim to authority was no better than those of the other groups which Hobbes devoted his life to attacking – notably the clergy of an established church. At a deeper level, however, Shapin and Schaffer also believe ...”

“... sunny, easy-going and benevolent figure that he depicts’. I would never have described Daley’s self-portrait in those terms. Daley is quite ferocious and unforgiving in his account of other policemen, especially those who taunted him about his homosexuality: Sergeant Hunter was a rat ... Without a friend in the world and incapable of any action that was ...”

“... will certainly outlive them both. He is his country’s most eminent writer, his works are few, self-contained (very Paraguayan) and brilliantly written. Yet his masterpiece, I the Supreme, which first came out in Spanish in 1974 and finally reaches the English reading public today, in a suitably masterful translation by Helen Lane, is the kind of summa ...”

“... it came back to me why I felt as I did. In the play, Ruth Kaplan charges Yaron with gross self-interest. She claims that Yaron’s reward for keeping silent about the fate he knew awaited the Hungarian Jews in the camps was that he, his family and his associates would be allowed to emigrate to Israel. Yaron’s defence is twofold. If he had not obeyed ...”

“... the London clubs which were coming into their own at this time, such behaviour reflected a more self-conscious and assertive masculine style. But this brittle machismo did not express itself in stiff upper lips, which were a Victorian and not a Georgian invention. Think of Burke in December 1792 flinging a dagger onto the floor of the Commons as a symbol of ...”

“... loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the humorous self-perception of which he was capable: both men shared in their different ways the restlessness and the need for total dominance of a ‘perfect’ environment. ‘He wanted an island all of his own,’ writes Lawrence in the story: ‘not to be alone on ...”

“... fantasy and gratification, as of female preoccupation, defensiveness, embarrassment and self-awareness. Not only does the real North American man show himself as a tit-man but the real woman is a tit-woman. In the pop annals of the transatlantic sex war, we have often heard the male denounce the archetypal woman as a ‘ball-breaker’. It now ...”

“... play tricks on scientists, especially when they are given such a golden opportunity either for self-glorification or for the glorification of their God. Anonymity, in this context, is no guarantee against a tendency on the part of informants to swank about their supposed religious experiences: God presumably knows the identity of each informant even if ...”

“... Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage production recordings and the printed text. Gaskell convincingly demonstrates that ...”

“... seen the light.’ He also owns another house not quite so splendid but very lucrative. Another self, an alter ego, the billionaire that he might have become had he stayed in ‘monstrous’ New York, begins to emerge as he negotiates the contracts on his property development project. The house on the jolly corner he leaves empty of furniture, but filled ...”

“... deception is fundamental to animal communication; and presumably the best deception is based on self-deception since it precludes involuntary tell-tale signs that might give the deceiver away. Yet to deceive oneself necessarily presupposes that one part of the mind is inaccessible to another. It could accordingly be evolutionarily advantageous that certain ...”

“... of academics, was well aware that the muse can be overpowered and seduced. In his Memoirs and self-adulatory campaign narratives, Montgomery enhanced his own undeniably great achievements by denigrating Auchinleck’s generalship and by exaggerating the poor condition of the Eighth Army when he assumed command in August 1942. Montgomery’s version of the ...”

“... it’s inextricably linked with Oskar’s human failings. His goodness seems inseparable from his self-indulgence, his appetites for cognac and women, his skill at black-marketeering, his talent for not merely cultivating but actually enjoying the company of the murderous Plaszow camp commandant – ‘drinking with the devil’: ‘He’s always been a man ...”

“... and plants, and what seems like the entire lexicon of Chinese medicine. There is an odour of self-congratulation in the dictionary’s emphasis on science, and certain Chinese inventions, such as the seismograph, are written up at some length. Older Chinese dictionaries illustrated usage with tags such as ‘the filial son grows from the end of the ...”