“... For a while Crick turned his attention to the origin of life (defined as the origin of the self-replicating molecules of DNA and RNA) and went so far as to suggest ‘directed panspermia’ – the seeding of Earth with self-replicating gemmules of nucleic acids from outer space – to account for it. But more and ...”

“... Some decades coincide with historical periods, give or take a year or two. The Twenties were self-contained as the era between the Great War and the world slump, and the Thirties a loaded pause between one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with the euphoria of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964 ...”

“... reaching the threshold of parenthood, and negotiating the ordeal of young adulthood with its self-deceptions and illusory freedoms, is not an innocent one in Atwood’s earlier novels: on the contrary, it seems to release the underlying Puritan strain in her imagination. The Edible Woman is the story of two flatmates, one of whom escapes at the last ...”

“... was how he could sympathetically record, as official biographer, the life of one of the most self-aggrandising figures of our time. Ziegler is a writer before all else. Accorded access to the ‘riches’ of Mountbatten’s Broad-lands archives and with little inclination to investigate more deeply, he does what he is best at – producing a ...”

“... adoption of a fashion, a new style of painting to be tried and dropped as soon as the need for self-expression became too great. And Expressionism, as Donald Judd points out, ‘is not an important idea in the art of this century, since it is the weakest attempt to deal with the disintegration of traditional representation’. Picasso could change styles ...”

“... ends. Anonymity ensured that the reviewer for his part subordinated personality to the collective self of the journal. There was no attempt to provide a complete view of the books of the day: what makes the quarterlies historically momentous is their automatic assumption that reviewing books was a central participation in social affairs. A review was the ...”

“... Anglo-Norman cuisine diverged from its French counterpart. Moreover – and this underlies a self-imposed limitation in the scope of All Manners of Food – neither French nor English cookery (let alone Italian or Spanish) can be properly understood without taking into account the extra-European influences upon which all relied in different degrees. As ...”

“... you used to cook food or treat frost-bite. The tablets themselves represent another tribute to self-sufficiency. Writing on wood was common enough in the Greco-Roman world. Normally, to judge from the survivals and from the comments of their literary users, the flat surface of the tablet held a shallow central depression, which was filled with wax. Such ...”

“... and screamed with frustration when she failed.’ Growing up in a plutocratic household, where self-indulgence was encouraged and petulance tolerated, she ‘became used to doing more or less what she liked’. Her father’s election to Parliament in 1879 netted invitations from ‘everybody of importance’ and, in turn, filled the Tennant establishments ...”

“... used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and perhaps even a self-contradictory idea. Good nuclear weapons have to be weapons which are feared so deeply and so steadily that there is never a real danger of their being used. But weapons of which there is literally no danger of their being used cannot rationally be feared at ...”

“... thoughts; he is a tyrannical but weak master, who looks to God or predestination for excuses. Self-righteously, or with God as his excuse, he flogs Galant and the other slaves for every offence. In a fit of rage he beats Galant’s child to death. The resistance he encounters in Galant is an animal one, like the resistance of horses to their ...”

“... note either this, or the military carriage, or the regulation side-whiskers, or ‘some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command’, or the manner in which the Marine held his head and swung his cane. As the Holmes saga developed, Conan Doyle came to see that it would be to the advantage of the stories that his readers should be afforded a clear ...”

“... to mean ‘Bloom’ when he refers to ‘the Bloomian discourse’, and to mean the unity of the self when he speaks of the ‘integrity’ of the Bloomian monologue. His general argument is that Ulysses isn’t a realistic novel: ‘The Joycean text is not “viable”, is not “transformable” into the real. The whole artifice (and the whole success, as ...”

“... which finds the Greenham Women a useful propaganda tool, in a small way – and of course the self-publicists and media operators’; that telephone-tapping is essentially harmless unless used against tax-evaders (‘some of the worst Gestapo-type searches at dawn have involved small businesses’); that the aims of the peace movement are ‘objectively ...”

“... non-workers, malcontents, freelance pickets. Alice, the good girl manqué, not without a spot of self-delusion, throws in her lot with some bad hats. A stubborn and deadly innocence is one of her characteristics. Not that we’re invited, in these pages, to relish, or to marvel at, anyone’s depravity: Doris Lessing is far too conscientious to be ...”