“... The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (1985), so there is a certain amount of self-repetition. Martin sets out both to suggest that Verne’s voluminous oeuvre is emblematic of all fiction and criticism, and to draw an engaging portrait of literary monstrosity. If these narratives are the product of a ‘literary brontosaurus’, they also ...”

“... and limited in high-society life by her extreme short-sightedness. To her, Sarah’s wit, looks, self-confidence and evident female success seemed dazzling, and she developed a crush on her of almost schoolgirl intensity. In November 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to oust Anne’s father, King James II, the Marlboroughs seized their ...”

“... he and others like him kept open alternative possibilities. He, too, deplores the exiles’ self-serving division of the country into black and white, good and evil, and its indiscriminate branding of all those who remained after the coup as at least covert supporters of the regime, pinochetistas. Perhaps this would not have mattered so much if the ...”

“... The colour shots are very striking, in a Tokyo-printed, fat-magazine kind of way; that slightly self-conscious excellence of serious investment lurking behind a noble topic – ‘Life’, ‘Time’, ‘Nature’, one of those single-name enterprises. The gourmet layout freezes your attention for a moment, but then you have to keep the pages flicking to ...”

“... threat to Israel’s existence. For all these reasons, Shamir is an apostle not of peace but of self-reliance, of a consolidated Israeli presence on the West Bank, of a build-up in Israel’s military strength, and of steadfastness in relation to international pressures. The Likud leader and his colleagues do not accept the basic formula of exchanging ...”

“... half-way through Swallow. Most surprisingly, the tone of the narrative is wryly comic and often self-mocking. It’s an unexpected treat after the sledgehammer jokes of Summit and the lecherous self-pity of Dreams and Hallucinations. Thomas’s comedy begins with his fictional characters demanding equal billing as authors ...”

“... is almost always seen as a disguise of some sort, and at the same time as an announcement, a self-chosen spectacle. In her novella, The Fair Jilt (reprinted in modernised spelling in the Penguin), the central characters have to get dressed for their trials, and for their executions. Miranda, the heroine (or villain) of the piece, has had her sister ...”

“... of her fondness for motorcycling ‘rough trade’); yes, in spite of being a very publicly self-confessed Christian, she was married to a divorced alcoholic who worked on the News of the World, but, Barbara Reynolds genuinely makes us feel – so what? This is not really the heart of Sayers or – to use Reynolds’s title – her ‘life and ...”

“... does little to ground in reality: the clubbing to ‘death’ by Lucas of the Russian Jew and self-styled psychoanalyst, Peter Mir. Lucas has lured his brother Clement to ‘a small park in North London’ under the pretext of showing him some glow-worms. As Clement (Abel) peers under a bush for these evanescent beasties, Lucas (Cain) makes to beat him ...”

“... in Egypt and Algeria, anti-abortion activists in America and the Jewish groups who inhabit the self-imposed ghettos of Meir Shearim in Jerusalem or try to sabotage the Palestinian peace process. Kepel concludes that all such movements have arisen ‘in a world that has lost the assurance born of scientific and technical progress since the Fifties. Just as ...”

“... the time Kelly arrives to watch them undergo ‘the first ritual of prison life, the stripping of self’: Each man emptied his pockets. Their belongings made a pile in the mud, a sad litter of cheap plastic combs, letters from home, empty wallets, matches and the occasional cigarette, a few coins. In the background, two Iraqis lay dead, one covered with a ...”

“... production. As the study of validity in argument or inference, logic must be autonomous, self-contained. It was a new demand in Peirce’s time and that he should have insisted on it entitles him to the high place he has been accorded by W.V. Quine as one of the two great sources, with Frege, of modern logic. Four years after getting a ...”

“... so fast that steelworkers, coalminers or welders must themselves abandon lifetime proclivities, self-images and workplace companions to acquire demanding new skills – on penalty of chronic unemployment or unskilled low-wage labour – failure and frustration are the likely results. To be sure, nothing could be more old-hat than to worry about the travails ...”

“... its potential for awfulness. The idea that Mrs Thatcher might think Britain should become self-sufficient in wood is the novel’s only implausible flight of fancy, and it is imaginatively a good one. The image of the British countryside replaced by conifer plantations conveys the banality of Thatcherism and its meanness of spirit, and it lends the ...”

“... feasts. All the same, the gestures of the officers, forks and glasses in hand, will seem less self-evidently absurd to anyone who has read van Alkemade or Schama and is aware of the importance of festival rituals in 17th-century culture. This example is very far from being the only one in which Schama juxtaposes the evidence of contemporary writers with ...”