“... the apples on a tree.) But what she lacks in formal education, Dr Sweet Mother makes up for in self-confidence, street smarts and ambition. In her Independence Day speech, she denounces Tuvy’s ambitions to succeed the Old Horse, but she is quietly plotting to bypass the Seat of Power and install herself as leader. Bulawayo has chosen her animals ...”

“... to their previous owners, a dozen being among the 25 barons – the most barefaced example of self-interest in the proceedings. When the king met the barons at Oxford a month later, they treated him with contempt. John was in bed, unable to walk because of gout. The barons refused to come to him in his chamber. When he was carried into them on a ...”

“... bolder claims disfigures, is also impaired by the worn phrasing of portentous historiographical self-positioning. This is a ‘post-revisionist’ volume that aims to ‘revitalise’ studies of the era by, among other moves, adopting the insights of ‘the “cultural turn”’. The authors deploy a ‘diverse set of methodologies and narrative ...”

“... might still emerge a ‘new object’ needing to be represented was not, in 1932, simply self-delusion. I realise that this last form of words offers cold comfort, and no doubt has a ‘Western Marxist’ flavour to it. But I stand by it – I think it is true to the tortured reality – and turn finally to Deineka and Eisenstein for support. Not ...”

“... favourite potential target. Incinerating North Korea in a pre-emptive strike would be an act of self-defence, as Trump sees it: in his speech to the UN General Assembly, he said that the US ‘will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’ if ‘Rocket Man’ develops a weapon that can reach Denver. (Like genocide, nuclear war is invariably ...”

“... been rediscovered in 1900) that an adequate explanation could be given. Part of Julian Huxley’s self-appointed task was to frame a new evolutionary synthesis that married Darwinian and Mendelian ideas.Genetics also opened up new possibilities for the human species. It was standard practice in horticulture and livestock breeding to weed out weaker strains ...”

“... dominant themes of both his journal and his letters to Elsie is the urge to escape the ‘terrible self-contemplation’ to which he is prone, especially at weekends, in the city; and to recover through contact with nature a sense of his physical being. ‘I doubt,’ he writes of an outing in the autumn of 1902,if there is any keener delight in the world ...”

“... about the English bourgeoisie: Their character has been moulded in the course of centuries. Class self-esteem has entered into their blood and marrow, their nerves and bones. It will be much harder to knock the self-confidence of world rulers out of them. But the American will knock it out just the same, when he gets ...”

“... to make claims that are simply unsourced. Perhaps they think these are conclusions that flow self-evidently from the pattern of events. They include claims that Stalin deliberately kept his ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US ...”

“... The book also spread the word autism he had made up a little earlier, to indicate the total self-absorption of some of his patients. His examples were pretty bizarre, and make you think that the bourgeoisie of those days were even nuttier than we can imagine. The noun was used regularly, if not frequently, in German-language (including what we would now ...”

“... uneasiness about motive: is the denouncer the patriot that he claims to be, or is he acting out of self-interest and a wish to settle personal scores? The rhetoric of civic virtue with which governments (and schools, prisons and other closed institutions) surround denunciation coexists with a subaltern counter-discourse in which denunciation is an act of ...”

“... facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from ...”

“... defined type of dementia called vascular dementia. Those of us not affected yet, either in self or family, tend to equate Alzheimer’s with memory loss, and that is what Rose inevitably emphasises. We forget the ‘agitation, aggression, hallucinations, delusions and other behavioural and psychiatric symptoms of Alzheimer’s’: I am quoting from the ...”

“... Series (1905). The use of these descriptive lines in ‘Gerontion’, in many ways an Eliot self-portrait, suggests that indeed Eliot identified with Fitzgerald in spite of his appearance in the Ellis book. But surely only a homophobic bigot would have refrained from ‘pointing out his passion’ for a poet he admired on account of his appearance in ...”

“... depiction of ordinary rural life, in the coaxing of opaque inner lives, and most of all in his self-smothering ability to see life not as a writer might see it, but entirely from within the minds of his mostly uneducated characters. More than Chekhov indeed, who was always an intellectual, if an uncannily bashful one, Verga writes from within a community ...”