“... orientation, and so the absence from the media of a range of homosexual representations encourages self-oppressive silence. But dwarfism is a rather different condition, visible to excess, impossible to disavow (the book contains a closet midget, a full-grown actor who plays a child, but dwarfs don’t have that option). It strikes a false note that Cady ...”

“... it was me living my life’ do net enlighten one much. And her soul-searching can look like self-indulgent meandering. ‘Reaching deep into the opaque blue water of memory, I wanted to find a shape beneath, something of the vast mass underpinning that depression,’ she writes, as a prelude to her recollections of what she herself at one stage ...”

“... voyeur and sadomasochist. The scientist’s life story is one of unbroken commitment and self-transcendence. Born in 1894, Kinsey spent the first ten years of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous ...”

“... the seats at once of lust for gain and taste for luxurious ease which sapped the will to sacrifice self for state, and of the proletarian alienation and socialist militancy that placed the class before the national struggle. They need not have worried. The ability of each of the states concerned to represent its war as one of defence turned the flank of a ...”

“... idiom and coinages (‘diddleypush’, ‘rainbowy’) – are used to make this rhetorically self-conscious prose suggest the voice of a shelf-stacker in an Oban superstore. In the first novel one didn’t argue with this sleight-of-hand, partly because Morvern’s oddnesses were so seductive and her imagery so beautiful, but most of all because the book ...”

“... sick with a cough and a temperature. By the end of the week, she has recovered, but we ask her to self-isolate for 14 days.5 March. The UK records its first death from Covid-19. In London, there have been four confirmed cases.7 March. I spend five hours in the middle of the day with the choir I run in Highbury in north London, rehearsing for a concert at the ...”

“... emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it possible for millions of people to share information in real-time. In Hayek’s view, that infrastructure was the price system of a free ...”

“... written by submariners explain how US submarines ‘really’ won the war at sea. The American self-image is so much identified with technological mastery, it seems self-evident that superior weapons and equipment must have been the key to success then as now. The new US submarines introduced in 1941 were certainly well ...”

“... their radios on throughout the night. Nevertheless, if, for example, a Security Council ambassador self-destructs on Radio 4 or on television something of a fuss ensues. Bosses congratulate you on the interview; friends and colleagues mention that they heard it. Other media outlets carry the story. On the World Service you are broadcasting in a ...”

“... modelled on the Manchu alphabet. Tsu has some entertaining stories about the adventures of the self-aggrandising Wang, as related in his multi-volume memoir. After being charged with treason in 1898 for opposing what he saw as the Qing dynasty’s capitulation to the Western world, Wang fled to Japan; two years later he returned in disguise as a Buddhist ...”

“... and people were on the lookout. So when a bank employee on his lunch break noticed a tall, self-assured Englishman going in and out of a number of different banks in central Melbourne, he called the police. They were told by the British authorities that two prominent Englishmen had gone missing and that there was a way of telling them apart: one had a ...”

“... be a world of panel discussions, graduate student workshops, grant applications, affect theory and self-help jargon. Late in the book she makes a parenthetical observation about academia, ‘a field known for articulating liberatory possibilities in language that often excites little to no felt sense of them’. The verb ‘perseverate’ keeps appearing, so ...”

“... interested in memory loss per se; she is interested in what it’s like to have one’s sense of self fundamentally change. Before his injury, Toby never had to scrutinise himself. He was effortlessly charming and persuasive. ‘I never thought much about my, my personality before,’ Toby tells Hugo. ‘But when I did, I took it for granted that it was ...”

“... saw the similarities between humans and other species: the childlike bravado of rabbits, the self-interest of certain cats and the unmistakeable resemblance of a middle-aged woman in a panic to a duck in a bonnet and shawl. Her family, friends and the innumerable pets she kept all her life were the objects of her study and became, eventually, the ...”

“... base. And then, in 2013, in the aftermath of the hacking scandal and the failures of press self-regulation, the queen in council imposed a royal charter on self-regulation of the press. The Privy Council remains an important instrument of governmental business, though it is now essentially a mechanism by which ...”