“... in The People’s Clearance (1982) that Highlanders ‘largely lacked … the ability of fluent self-expression’. Hunter is careful to present the evidence for all he records. No assertion is left unqualified. The evictors are quoted verbatim – and of course they were in command of the contemporary media and had a great deal to say. They were ...”

“... the basement; Levy herself is putting together the crosswords in ‘a constant state of embittered self-righteousness’. Yet the anticipated moment of maturity never arrives; success does instead. By the age of 34, Levy has talked David Remnick into hiring her as a staff writer at the New Yorker, and after that there is, as her dad rather ominously puts ...”

“... quitted with disgust, the cheering fields regained,’ he wrote years later. His self-imposed exile ended only when Sir John Johnstone – who em­ployed him as a land steward on his ­est­ate in Hackness – brought Smith’s maps to the attention of the Royal Geographical Society.A second map exists at Bur­lington House, behind another ...”

“... it’s this growing unease that lends They some narrative continuity despite each section being self-contained, with its own title and its own set of ‘characters’ (a word I put in quotation marks because the protagonists aren’t described or developed and remain little more than names). Only the narrator recurs and even he/she may be a different person ...”

“... sometimes on a quasi-ethnographic mission to encounter the other as a means to decentre the self à la Michel Leiris. In 1939 the Swiss-born photographer Eva Sulzer sailed along the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, where she documented the old longhouses and totem poles of Indigenous peoples; in 1960 the African American artist Ted Joans departed ...”

“... editions. As applied in the field it was problematic. In India, the Hindu practice of sati, the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres, was appalling to the British, but there was resistance to interference with religious practices. Müller, like some Hindus, argued that sati wasn’t a true religious obligation, so might be censured. After ...”

“... make me different? Did I feel different? . . . I swung back and forth be­tween rejection, doubt, self-hatred and pride in being different from the others . . . I had no place at all in the world! Neither in German society, nor in Cameroon . . . I had no house, no home, I was a nobody in the family and country where I lived. These words​ , reminiscent of ...”

“... and insecure state doubtless led to wider definitions than might have been acceptable in more self-assured national communities. Nevertheless the elements were clearly there – a soaring population in a countryside increasingly unable to feed it, land in few and extortionate hands, and cities unable to absorb the rural exodus by providing immigrants with ...”

“... little that is known. Kiernan writes of the Covenanters as humble folk who took up arms only in self-defence. This might suggest some lack of acquaintance with their more bloodthirsty statements – for instance, the ‘Apologetical Declaration’. The trouble with Kiernan’s image of the ‘humble’ and ‘passive’ dissident Covenanters persecuted by ...”

“... lists old and influential Popes and theologians. But nothing statistical can be learnt from such self-selected samples, usually of people of affluence or standing, even if the ages alleged are correct. Fame, after all, has more chance of attaching itself to the long than the short-lived. A more interesting suggestion put forward here is that the Black Death ...”

“... and on the way in which all football-related sorrow and upset are merely forms of operatic self-pity. The amalgamation of the specific and the general is very skilful. At one point, an account of Cambridge United v. Orient (4 November 1978, a 3-1 win for the home team) becomes, via the birth of a pre-match ritual that has to do with biting the heads ...”

“... of animal and plant, how they arise, and how and why they become extinct. Biologists are given to self-congratulation – and have a lot to congratulate themselves about. After all, they already know all the interesting things about genetics, and soon may even understand something about evolution and animal behaviour. There is, however, a secret about modern ...”

“... and journalists are too histrionic to carry conviction: but in the theatre, eccentricity and self-indulgence are everyone’s legitimate stock-in-trade. The individual flamboyance of Davies’s characters contrasts with the neutrality of the public sphere that contains them. An Englishwoman remarks, in What’s bred in the bone, that ‘Canada is an ...”

“... The only way that could be imagined for getting out more energy than was put in was to induce a self-sustaining reaction in a mass of deuterium gas. This would happen if the gas could be raised to a very high temperature, where all the deuterons would be moving so fast that they would occasionally bang together with enough energy to fuse. Crowd the ladies ...”