“... city of Oran, but it wasn’t going well and Camus was struggling, as he often did, with punishing self-doubt. His wife, Francine Faure, who had spent the war in Algiers, had rejoined him in Paris and given birth to twins, but their reunion had cost him his greatest love, the Spanish actress María Casares. He and Casares, the daughter of left-wing Spanish ...”

“... with big romantic gestures, an undivided attention that can’t sustain itself, a bigger sense of self than of any coupledom. I didn’t need a quiz to know that. And yet, I had some hope. This second time was my favourite time with him. We did Midwestern things: picked corn at my grandfather’s plot, bowled at a place between our houses. In the ‘family ...”

“... business district; Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), which proposed verdant, self-contained new towns to accommodate what would later be called ‘overspill’ from the metropolis; and the City Beautiful Movement, which seized American planners in the early 1900s with its vision of grand, vaguely Parisian classical ensembles – usually ...”

“... Map Two follows the sequence of Israeli transfers of West Bank territory to Palestinian self-rule between 1994 and 1999. Map Three gives a detailed picture of the West Bank after the second Israeli redeployment earlier this year. The current demographic status of annexed East Jerusalem can be seen on Map Four. A breakdown of land expropriations in ...”

“... Europe and the US, showing it won’t shirk from a staggering level of violence and grievous self-inflicted wounds to further its leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of ...”

“... to purify national communities, initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and self-immolation. Its devastating potential was rooted in the paradoxical promise of a revolution carried out in defence of hierarchy. As Paxton noted, this led either to entropy, as the movement failed to deliver, or to increasing radicalism, as leaders raced to ...”

“... good. He sees a real danger – of a carelessly supervised AGI rapidly developing through self-improvement into an all-powerful ASI with an a-human final intention – that is amenable to a real solution, of the precursor AI, the ‘seed AI’, being infused with pro-human values.Bostrom offers various strategies to define those values, and to get the ...”

“... from an entry on 11 June of that year. This episode has some of the same shape, movement and self-sufficiency as Plath’s account of the St Botolph’s party; it even provides a natural closure to the first phase of Plath’s dazzlement. She had suspected Hughes of a flirtation or liaison – Clark writes in Red Comet that in this case he was most ...”

“... at the hospital that morning looking even after weeks of illness not much different from her usual self; weeping and distraught, it’s true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. He ...”

“... papers and letters over the past sixty years has helped to establish this sense of a Yeatsian self in constant re-creation. Ann Saddlemyer’s biography of George Yeats, short on analysis and long on meticulously researched detail, at times verging on the unreadable, offers a more taxing version of the life of Mrs Yeats than Brenda Maddox’s George’s ...”

“... took hold; ‘modern’ subjects, such as history, languages and science, were introduced; a new self-consciousness developed about educating the governing and administrative class of the future; and the sense of the universities’ place in the national culture grew. Second, in the 1870s and 1880s new universities were established in the great cities which ...”

“... losers, interchangeable and predictable, was cumulatively dispiriting: the timeless dance of the self-deceived that takes place whenever bookmakers and punters meet. Go into any bookies today and not much has changed. And yet, compared to the shiny new betting shops that have been popping up on so many high streets recently, the one I worked in belonged to ...”

“... Rap Guide to Evolution, featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show ...”

“... a faint blue pastel to her palette. And that, kids, was that.It is impossible to overstate their self-effacing beauty. Martin herself wrote that she believed the function of art to be ‘the renewal of memories of moments of perfection’. Making art seems to have been a kind of meditation for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation ...”

“... writing about France, in quantities no neighbouring land can rival. Confronted with this mass of self-description, what can the alien gaze hope to add? The advantages of estrangement, would be the anthropological reply – Lévi-Strauss’s regard lointain. But in England we lack the discipline of real distance. France is all too misleadingly familiar: the ...”