“... couldn’t have chosen anyone better suited to the role: Julia is detached, pragmatic and without self-pity. After some painful, empty years she resumes things with Jim. The two sinners still go to Mass; they crowd into rooms that smell of ‘misery and whiskey’; they are, in the eyes of their fellow Catholics, perfectly respectable. Then Julia starts ...”

“... of the doors.For the next five hundred years, Orsanmichele bore witness to Florence’s shift from self-governing state to Grand Duchy to key city (and, briefly, capital) of the Italian Republic. It was at the heart of Florence’s civic and cultural life; its upper floors served as the archive of contracts and testaments under Cosimo I de’ Medici in the ...”

“... why sentience is fundamental to moral standing. But without the full Utilitarian metaphysic of self and action, the appeal to sentience is an appeal to a moral intuition which those who take an entirely permissive or an entirely restrictive view of abortion policy and decisions will not share. The Utilitarianism which Sumner develops is of the humane ...”

“... came from outer space during the Blitz. He (‘it’, one should say) has the power of apostolic self-perpetuation: if he can touch a human in his dying moments, he will migrate, displacing his host’s personality. His first incarnation is spent in the body of a boy orphaned by the London bombs. He (‘they’? – SF can pose irritating pronominal ...”

“... chosen by Hofstadter and Dennett because they illuminate in one way or another the problems of self-reference, personal identity, consciousness, and the relations between language, mind and brain. The editors have, as they put it, ‘arranged and composed’ the pieces, and they have provided for each an engaging ‘reflection’ or commentary. Although ...”

“... a remotely comparable mental development. Where Harewood seems a born professional musician, self-bred as an amateur, the late John Culshaw was the born musical amateur, whose eventual breeding was to become ever more professional. In 1967, his last year as a gramophonist and the projected last of his unfinished memoirs, he was even appointed Head of the ...”

“... and sometimes in utter ignorance, by the proletariat of economically-depressed areas. The self-taught bootmaker, a voracious reader, would pore over the latest ‘red’ theory, however insane; while the workers who gathered round him, believing and following every word he spoke, scarcely looked at the new socialist classics (even assuming they could ...”

“... many of those which have separate sexes have probably evolved that habit as a method of avoiding self-fertilisation. Animals are less often hermaphrodites – no mammals or birds are so. This may be because there is often a law of increasing returns for male investment. A red deer stag which was 10 per cent larger would probably increase his harem size by ...”

“... or a wheeler-dealer. (Though he did make one rather clumsy political gesture during his speech in self-consciously mentioning the Women’s Movement: he knows that women activists among his Far Left block of support are lukewarm about his record on feminist issues and wanted Jo Richardson to be their candidate instead.) He is also not a great thinker: his ...”

“... women seems to have her own alley-way and her own little platoon of graves. They are vigorous and self-sufficient women who seem to have laid their own husbands in the earth long ago. After about an hour of futile wandering in search of Alyosha’s grave, we went up to one of the old women. We had a plot number and an alley number but, as is usually the case ...”

“... Kerouac set in almost immediately – the King of the Beats wavered alarmingly between bitter self-disgust and wild exhibitionist boasting. Unwilling to stand so close to the spectacle of disintegration or to compete with relentless groupies, Johnson finally broke off the relationship in the autumn of 1958. Minor Characters is much more than a ...”

“... that Caroline Moorehead has settled for a soft-focus studio portrait of this complex, versatile, self-made man. She is, as she makes clear in the preface, the daughter of old friends. His lifetime – he was born in 1899 – has spanned twice-nightly variety shows in suburban theatres and worldwide networks of round-the-clock television, yet the scale of the ...”

“... to be reminded for a while – certainly not at the time when Kipling was already at his lonely, self-appointed task. This labour of love, which incidentally gave its author the stomach ulcers which were eventually to kill him, was not written for outsiders, but what it conveys most authentically is the hardest thing of all to convey to outsiders: why did ...”

“... of polyhistoriographical ambitions explains why certain titles ‘which sound like Baroque self-parodies’ were still in use up to and during the Enlightenment. One of these books, cited by Grafton, was Pancirolli’s De rebus inventis et deperditis (1599). This book, which happens to be one of the few I’ve read that Grafton apparently hasn’t, was ...”

“... purity have always brought calamity on themselves and others, so the families and houses that self-select for breeding have declined in a welter of cretinism and porphyria, to say nothing of disputed codicils. Nonetheless, the interest in forebears and provenance is human and natural and often harmless – or absurd, as in the thousand generations of ...”