“... isn’t immediately obvious that the final reference point for Walter’s rationality is his own self-interest and self-regard. As his evasions become intolerable to Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, he insists he’s ready to open up to her. But it turns out his idea of confession is Skyler telling him what she suspects him of ...”

“... experience’. No serious naturalist could deny it. Nevertheless, beginning in the 20th century, self-styled naturalists have seemed to think that questioning or doubting or denying the existence of experience is part of a thoroughgoing naturalism. How did this happen? It began with the transmogrification of behaviourism early in the 20th ...”

“... upbringing in County Clare from a distance not yet far enough to be fond; she wrote in complicated self-exile from Ireland, which had banned her first six books. Mother Ireland contains some of her finest evocations of childhood outside her first novel, The Country Girls, and the underrated A Pagan Place (1970), and gives us some of the quotes about Ireland ...”

“... effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North ...”

“... embarrassing to begin speaking of her in this way, since Paley is known not as a purveyor of self-help but for writing some of the more ambitious and surprising American short stories of the 20th century. And while she did write about gossip, women’s friendships, long days alone with toddlers and other aspects of experience that were not, in the ...”

“... witnesses for the prosecution are a prickly masseuse with petty grudges, a former team-mate and self-confessed cheat, who is bitter at being dropped from Armstrong’s team, and Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France. LeMond has recently repeated his accusations in interviews. He finds Armstrong’s comeback incredible and dates his own ...”

“... and his worldly occupation: the former was to be manifest in the latter. It was through rigorous self-analysis and constant application to duty that the elect ascertained his election, and since to doubt election was to demonstrate that one belonged to the reprobate, such analysis and application were the necessary seals of salvation. Scottish theology, as ...”

“... Catholic shadow falling over so much of his beliefs. Most ironic of all is when Mr Freeman’s self-emasculation from the historical and the Irish dimensions leads him to scold Edmund Burke for failing to understand the Irish Catholic question. As examples go of scholarly wisdom after the fact, it is a fine entry, comparable to the economic historians who ...”

“... a life-story with a distinctly Shandian turn, but one that is also a serious inward quest and self-examination. These different departments are juxtaposed or merged with dazzling fluency – the verve, the apparently spontaneous resourcefulness of the tale are amazing – and up to a point the fact that all this throws up ambiguities and puzzles for the ...”

“... Prize.The cycle of protest that started in Britain in late 2010 was unusually contentious, and self-consciously part of this global wave. It included student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees, mass marches against austerity accompanied by occupations of tax-dodging shops, and a homegrown version of Occupy Wall Street on the steps of St ...”

“... makes clearer the socialist politics Adorno preferred to obscure for reasons of comfort and self-preservation: it’s clear why they didn’t want it published.Adorno never fully committed to the West in the Cold War – whereas Horkheimer supported the war in Vietnam on ‘yellow peril’ grounds – but he knew on which side his bread was buttered. He ...”

“... debt repayment schedule on the condition that Varoufakis (whom they considered untrustworthy and self-interested) wasn’t in the room. He resigned, and Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, clung on to power by cleaving ever more closely to macroeconomic orthodoxy, expunging any element of populism along the way.Politics in the late 2010s was fertile ...”

“... from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of ...”

“... for crime. His schemes attracted a wide following, particularly among industrial workers and self-taught intellectuals of the lower middle class. The Owenite socialist movement in the 1830s and 1840s constituted what was probably the most extensive radical counter-culture that had existed in England since the time of the Civil War. Yet few historians ...”

“... the ministers used about the King. Asquith is supine, silent, complacent, immobile, dilatory and self-indulgent. Churchill is insensitive, tactless, wilful and impossible. Bonar Law is unamiable, curt, dour, abrasive and disrespectful. Lloyd George is nonchalant, graceless and spiteful. Fisher is venomous, Baldwin is slothful, Balfour is irresolute. And the ...”