“... 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 ...”

“... Pancirolli wrote a very popular book on it in the 16th century, and it was often remarked by self-deprecating moderns that they were like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. The antiquity of this figure is the subject of a very learned and also very amusing book by Robert Merton; the received wisdom is that it goes at least as far back as the ...”

“... They are in the mainstream of public life. They can be safely quoted today as the source of self-evident truths. Because of these common-sense qualities, their ideas virtually monopolised British political thinking in the modern period. That did not mean that Britain was intellectually isolationist. German scholarship was much admired and emulated in ...”

“... and end, Singer’s conservatism is not a blind refusal. He is not in this a reactionary. The self-referential nature of Modernism, art aware of and concerned with its own processes, is not absent from his work. There are frequent stories about stories, stories about writers. The Warsaw Yiddish Writers’ club is a frequent setting or departure point in ...”

“... inhuman, so that the poet can acknowledge European history and suffering without sentimentality or self-regard. Thus in ‘Distant Howling’ Holub describes how in 1885 Pasteur saved his first patient, the nine-year-old Joseph Maister, with his new vaccine: Pasteur died of ictus ten years later. The janitor Meister fifty-five years later committed suicide ...”

“... did not really make an impact till after 1940. Sceptical anti-suffragist politicians (however self-interested) understood this situation when they doubted suffragist claims about what the vote would do for women. All four books are properly documented, and only Garner is sometimes inaccurate on details: The Vote was not a ‘WSPU paper’, but the organ ...”

“... war. But he has taken enormous pains to ensure that his claims to generality are underpinned by a self-questioning poetic strategy, which both lays bare the mechanisms of imaginative fiction and then contrives to work with them nonetheless. The result is a book which is far from easy to read. Occasionally Mackay Brown’s refusal to pamper us by remaining ...”

“... himself as definitively cured, he explained his cure in terms of the homeliest old-fashioned self-help. The ‘real clue to the labyrinth’ and basis of his recovery, he told Putnam, was eating enough, feeding as little fatteningly as possible, and having plenty of distractions. This brings us to a major issue in regard to Leon Edel’s great ...”

“... for the peaceful resolution of disputes and to the observance of agreements reached. It seemed self-evident – certainly it constituted a fundamental principle of the old Ministry of Labour for the fifty years of its existence – that a system of industrial relations predicated on the relative autonomy of employer and worker-representatives was more ...”

“... in English usage that Mr Bryson always was entirely clear about must make him one of the most self-confident users of English of all time. The other is that it is far from obvious when one has looked at the contents of his dictionary that Mr Bryson has very good reason to believe himself entirely clear about many matters of English usage even now. But ...”

“... as a ‘Jones Report on the Later Roman Empire’. De Ste Croix retains, in much more explicit and self-conscious form, the same social and political commitment: ‘I am a historian who tries also to be a sociologist, and my interest in our own society is a primary one.’ This interest informs the book throughout, imparting gravity and moral energy when the ...”

“... a former policeman who was heavily involved in the conspiracy to kill, and Pierre de Varga, a self-proclaimed aristocrat of Hungarian origins who was allegedly the instigator of the whole affair, were also given ten years; Serge Tessèdre, who was accused of recruiting the gunman, received five years, and as he had already spent that time in prison, was ...”

“... urgent need, on the contrary, was for the state to exercise its initiative to unwind the spiral of self-reinforcing market trends. Does Keynes’s insight hold good in the 1980s? It was developed to explain the flaw at the heart of a general attempt to pile up excessive savings. It pointed to the necessary role for the state in correcting the anomalies of the ...”

“... seal up his letters ‘because of the servant’. One of the results of the Renaissance habit of self-conscious re-editing of letters is that the printed correspondence of friends often seems less spontaneous than the snipings of enemies: friends had time to tidy things up. But these letters are full of delightful details, not least about the ...”