“... observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt ...”

“... and feeding tubes, or ask for terminal sedation. Evidently, the same end could often be achieved more quickly and effectively by a lethal injection, so the value of the patient’s well-being does not draw a ‘bright line’ between assisted death and other measures. If we turn to the value of autonomy, we do find a difference. The currently recognised ...”

“... the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his ...”

“... the night, and that the sound of a motorway is ‘calming’, a ‘soft rush’ rather than the more predictable roar, is a gloomy prospect. Anna is not unlike Katharine. The narrator of The Love of Stones is at one point even mistaken for a tax inspector. Both women are loners; each has a more conventional sister from ...”

“... on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James ...”

“... for his speeches – ‘Dollar a minute or sixty minutes for fifty dollars. I have to ask a little more where I introduce my adjectives immediately after instead of before my nouns’ – he isn’t just announcing that he’s finally made it, he’s saying that he doesn’t mind being seen to be on the make. Frost’s difficult childhood would continue to ...”

“... to live a period of his life over again he might choose this one, the last. For Hume, nothing more needed to be said about waiting for death, a subject that we moderns have turned into a veritable genre. The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism, like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sickroom, which reports on her five-year-long retreat from ...”

“... Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends ...”

“... and fragile’, ‘the Venice of the new millennium’.* New York – or Manhattan, more precisely the subject of Gopnik’s book – has indeed become like Venice, but not because it’s fragile. It is more of a resort city than ever. This transformation occurred despite 9/11 – plans to make Manhattan ...”

“... and rages seem native to the realistic novel. One is also grateful for Jill Eisenstadt’s more straightforward ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s ...”

“... taking down a shorthand transcript of what is being said, a skill she normally employs in much more exalted circumstances; next week for instance she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only ...”

“... the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the first half of the 16th century Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop with the beard who created the Church of England. Cranmer’s beard dominates the cover. Instead of the familiar Flicke portrait of a clean-shaven prelate, MacCulloch or his editor (I’d bet it was MacCulloch’s choice) has ...”

“... news broke, via an announcement by Truman, of the bombing of Hiroshima, complete with promises of more to come, the reaction among Clarke’s supremely well-informed intelligence officers was shock and outrage. When I talked to them forty years later, veterans of the organisation recalled the shouts of ‘Why?’ and ‘How could they do that?’ echoing ...”

“... reason for his dejection: his mother, who was visiting, left eight days before, and he misses her more than he wants to admit. Chaudhuri is a master of the inconsequential detail, or rather of describing quotidian, often overlooked details that matter to the character observing or experiencing them, or take on a new consequence in his describing of ...”

“... most of the opportunity. Enormous posters of Marx, Lenin and Stalin were everywhere to be seen. More important, Negrin treated the Russians as indispensable friends. But the Republicans had no alternative beyond the unacceptable one of making peace. Given Negrin’s need for arms and the refusal of the British and French to supply them on anything like the ...”