“... in his search by the work of Auguste Laurent, whom he later wrote out of the record possibly for self-interested reasons. That, when he presented his results publicly, he expressed the clarity of his mature understanding rather than the confused path that had led him there. And that we should therefore be sceptical of scientists’ accounts of their own ...”

“... is made that much more efficient. In practice, the theory ignores both irrational fashion and self-serving motives. Quite often these days employees are fired whenever their labour can plausibly be held to be expendable by executives high or low eager to show themselves ‘hard-nosed’ and thoroughly up-to-date with the latest management-consultant ...”

“... That significance is obscured by the ideas of Sin and Truth, for these are individualistic, self-dramatising notions. Dewey thought that Christianity comes into its own only when people stop worrying about the state of their soul, and realise that their subjectivity is the creature of their culture rather than of either an angry or a sweet-tempered ...”

“... described in the memoir began in 1888, when the Yeats family were living in Bedford Park, a self-contained, rather bohemian artists’ community, between Hammersmith and Acton in West London. William was 23, Susan Yeats (or Lily, as she was known within the family) was 22, Elizabeth (Lolly) 20. Their father, who had given up the law shortly after he ...”

“... uprisings into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian’, almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world – to say nothing of the written archive of pre-20th-century ...”

“... through a soup of methane and ammonia and carbon dioxide. The resulting amino acids had to form self-replicating chains of protein, and these to turn into cells deriving energy from the only supply around: the Sun. Which meant they had to develop the ability to photosynthesise, in order to suck carbon dioxide from the primeval air, capture the carbon to ...”

“... not altogether nice Mme de Haussonville (we have her own word for that: she wrote of her young self that ‘there were two persons inside me, the good and the evil, and the evil usually overcame the good’) and Baronne James de Rothschild, who surprises you by her modern face, handsome, but also intelligent and amusing. In their own terms, these are ...”

“... and decay then how can one confront those ghosts of the past without hearing a mocking voice of self-justification? To beat that, one needs a black superman, an embodiment not only of suffering but of virtue and wisdom. And there have been so many disappointments. Nkrumah turned out to be a despot, Nyerere and Kaunda destroyed their own countries and did ...”

“... is that it is ‘the performance of personality’, an unswerving living out of the individual self. This makes it a highly ephemeral art form that leaves little more than anecdote behind. Given all of which, there is something perverse, if ultimately rewarding, in her attempt to bring academic analysis to bear on the subject at all. Generalising about ...”

“... base.’ The indefeasible good humour of his characters is Queneau’s gift to the deserving. High self-esteem was for Queneau the most blameable of vices; its absence a sufficient virtue. So it is with the Chaplinesque Pierrot, who has few if any talents and little luck, but whose final response to losing various jobs and the girl he is keen on is to burst ...”

“... to ‘duty’ and ‘the Firm’. By contrast, Diana had ‘soul’. She bared all about self-harm and her frequent calls, during her bulimic phase, on the great white telephone. She fondled children and animals, dabbled in New Age pursuits, kibitzed in operating theatres and had been stiffed on a pedalo by the thick-set offspring of a Levantine ...”

“... enthusiastically endorsing the attacks. Even then they looked petulant; now it is clear they were self-defeating. All they did was turn Bin Laden into a household name throughout the region, if not the world, and recruit thousands to his cause – itself very different from what the Americans believe it to be. The attack undermined the emerging moderate ...”

“... manipulated by their social betters, the ruling gentry and nobility, with a supporting cast of self-interested clergy? The first question has been in many ways badly framed. For one thing, the Pilgrimage was not a monolith. The articulated grievances of Richmondshire and Westmorland had to do with rents and entry fines; the issues in Lincolnshire fell ...”

“... depend on a one-to-one comparison. Second, it gives a result with regard to the demand for self-sacrifice different from the result it gives with regard to principles governing the conduct of impartial third parties. In the latter type of case, Scanlon holds that it is right to save the larger number, when the threatened losses are comparable (as they ...”

“... was that suggested by von Neumann’s later work: the mathematics of computation, especially of self-reproducing automata (robots that can make other robots), with its requirements for close attention to the computational limitations of different categories of abstract machine. Instead, led by Cowles, economics took Bourbaki’s route towards abstraction ...”