“... by arsenic was fairly rare. Most people, understandably, chose opium. Only about 10 per cent of self-poisoners ate arsenic, although according to one toxicologist it may have been ‘a national peculiarity’ that a much larger proportion of Americans used arsenic as a means of suicide. Perhaps fewer of them had read Madame Bovary and so didn’t know about ...”

“... comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office. It was a view shared by much of the New Labour administration. The law is the servant, they believed, of our duly elected political masters. It is what ...”

“... of the mind in terms of what is given in experience, and the latter (Leibniz) insisting on the self-propelled power of thought. Which side of the divide one places oneself on is partly a matter of intellectual temperament; but Skinnerian behaviourism and Darwinism are still scientific theories, answerable to empirical evidence. The partial similarity in ...”

“... raw – like a raw throat’. In her later years, she was ‘permanently convulsed with self-pity’. A friend of Thayer’s remembered Florence as seeming ‘rather to fear her brilliant son’, and for good reason, since his notes on her were quietly vicious: ‘remarkable my mother did not have whipped cream on her baked beans’. Thayer was at ...”

“... didn’t. The 96 per cent don’t think in one mind about anything. Many of the 47 per cent will self-identify with the 53 per cent. Many of the 53 per cent will self-identify with the 47 per cent. Politics is a messy business. And come election time, the candidate who manages to assemble a coalition of even 50.5 per cent ...”

“... faltered. ‘One will never feel the same again. I talk & laugh & listen but … one’s real self dies.’ She had lost more than a husband, she had lost her occupation. In the 1930s she described herself as an ‘anti-feminist’ believing that jobs should go to men and writing airily to her old friend D’Arcy Osborne that ‘women can be idle quite ...”

“... Wyatt – a man so steeped in horse-lore that the animals run through his poetry (‘I my self be bridilled of my mynde’) – galloped on through the night and the rain. It should have been his moment of glory. As a poet Wyatt fulfilled the central requirement for the ideal advocate. Ambassadors of the period were almost all ‘courtly makers’ of ...”

“... as Roman institutions had been successfully grafted onto the ‘rude’ Teutonic mark, so British self-government could be bonded with its analogue, the Indian panchayat. This would provide a ‘substratum’ for representative democracy. The British rulers should not fear local bodies of this sort, he added. The French Revolution and the recent Paris Commune ...”

“... did not accept that this fitted the Indian people in their current state for anything approaching self-government. After the Mutiny, with the enormous strengthening of the British regiments, India became an undisguised military dictatorship, and one which was in the end prohibitively expensive to maintain. Nor should we exaggerate the role played by ...”

“... last serious film was F for Fake) or some sort of allegory of influence. Learning that you have a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator on your hands – ‘I have always liked stunts (and also, as you may have guessed, pranks, hoaxes, games)’ – is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. In fact the ...”

“... think about it at all. A lot of Sunstein’s recent work has had this quality: scolding us for our self-righteousness and pointing out the human dimensions of various issues that we have failed to take rationally into account. In Worst-Case Scenarios, the scolding tone becomes more unpleasant when Sunstein confronts the critics of the US refusal to ratify the ...”

“... referred to themselves as the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets. The work of this group was always wrapped in self-justifying, crudely fashioned, post-structuralist commentary, and emphasised indeterminism, resistance to figuration, narrative, subject-matter, verbal music, imagery or any pleasure that might be associated with poetry, pleasure which they believed pandered ...”

“... the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make ...”

“... became Marilyn Monroe. Doris Kappelhoff became Doris Day, who then became Clara Bixby, a third self. You can look at the icon of Doris Day and at the woman known as Clara Bixby, but not at the same time. There are some sunny elements to her childhood: a beloved older brother, an extended family in a tight-knit German-American neighbourhood, an Uncle ...”

“... your speeches, Dick Nixon?’ jeered Charlene, a tall, leggy, mussed-blonde deserter groupie and self-described Missouri trailer trash. Charlene, fed up with ‘American fascist bullshit’, had landed on us one day along with a tubercular deserter from Stockholm’s snowdrifts, Stanislau (‘Stash’), the son of Polish immigrants who ran a bakery in ...”