“... four decades. Has this poet been too humble? Or has he been too proud? Is he to be admired for self-effacement or chastised for self-absorption? Over the years, Thomas has asked himself such questions many times, and his replies have been as non-definite as ours. According to Thomas’s eccentric but industrious ...”

“... support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human preconceptions, even the deepest abyss was teeming with life. A ...”

“... dream was dreamed in unforgotten days’ only to flee in anguish from the spectre of her youthful self: ‘I am shamed/Before that little ghost with eager eyes.’ There appear to have been several reasons for her decision to kill herself – not the least of which, as Beckman sensibly suggests, was a biochemical tendency to depression. But it can also seem ...”

“... ancestors; by the end, du Maurier/ Ibbetson’s mother has become his daughter and his childhood self, his own lovely grandchild. Here was a storehouse of themes, to be raided by the real descendant throughout her life, from the ancestral time-travel of The House on the Strand to the spiritualist element in The Scapegoat or Don’t Look Now; from nostalgia ...”

“... in a review of author and book together. What made Our Age so arresting was its combination of self-promotion and self-flagellation, and Annan’s wistful reflections on the failures, as well as the successes, of his own generation. Put simply, he could scarcely conceal his pride in what he and his peers had achieved ...”

“... class he came from, perhaps because of his somewhat Rousseauian early upbringing (all that self-reliance), his lack of a public school education and his family links with the commercial world. He was a dogmatic free marketeer, a self-styled ‘anti-Jingo’ and an enthusiast for European nationalisms. He flirted with ...”

“... catalogue of misery and violence. If this was empathy it was subordinate to a powerful overflow of self-pity, and present when I was at my most incapable. So one shouldn’t sentimentalise it: empathy that derives from the chronic impotence of depression doesn’t add up to much. Later, when I’d more or less recovered, I was, like most ...”

“... on the other hand I don’t. There are so many factors engaging our attention! Even as present self and poem give up pride of place to an earlier self and an earlier poem, neither self nor poem seems certain: And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will ...”

“... international law, or have a habit of complying with it . . . but simply that states act out of self-interest.’ This assumes that states can and do act rationally, and that in exercising rational choices the values they apply are consistent with those of Goldsmith and Posner. Practice suggests otherwise. The authors’ claim is difficult to sustain even ...”

“... Marathi and then Hindu identity, changed Bombay seemingly for good, taking away its cosmopolitan self-image. It was at this time that the ‘maximum city’ – burgeoning, and in the process pulling down the barriers that had kept the middle-class employee and the entrepreneur on the make, governance and criminality, politics and religion, in distinct ...”

“... books follow a kind of ideal of impersonal high-powered scholarship – because it is this very un-self-questioning trust in ‘impersonality’ that proves most self-limiting, least flexible in practice. Perhaps no scholarly essay is safely embarked on without some belief in the indeterminacy principle, or the fact that a ...”

“... Lipton is temperamentally unsuited to dealing with the French bureaucracy. In a solitary flash of self-irony she describes herself arriving at an office ‘about as serene as I can get’. Still, her generally het-up condition adds to the drama of the hunt, and so does the presence of Meurent by her side. Olympia takes her hand and speaks to her in paragraphs ...”

“... The self-effacing authors of this excellent book aim to contribute some clear-headedness and penetration to what ought to be our great debate, but is too often our puzzle-headed mumble, about war. So exemplary is the clarity of their rich, varied and powerful argument that their hopes may well be realised. Good books about ethics and warfare – that is, books which can meet the military and political ‘realists’ on their own grounds, without sacrificing moral principle – are not as rare as they used to be ...”

“... Like any self-respecting modern man I buy Ecover instead of Fairy Liquid. I recycle, I worry about my carbon footprint (must cut down on those Ryanair mini-breaks) and I’m about to buy my first hemp T-shirt. Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party ...”

“... mutations she left her own mark on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India. The temptation is to draw a continuous line from the first royal charter granted by another warrior queen on the last day of ...”