“... innovations that would spawn entirely new technology-based industries for the Boston region. A self-consciously hybrid creation, combining elements of research university, polytechnic and (last and least) liberal arts teaching college, MIT was not unique among 19th-century American institutions of higher education in combining such forms and purposes. In ...”

“... a defining moment, the point to which some enduring bitterness, or widescreen tragedy, or fond self-regard traces its poignant origin. The middle of this memory is much like any other: a series of snapshots, half-remembered conversations over lunch or tea breaks, fleeting glances, smiles and half-smiles, assumptions, hopes, doubts. Sometimes those ...”

“... then social reform was frustrated by an imperial overlord, it could morph into a mass movement for self-determination or even sovereign independence – which could in turn precipitate full-scale war, as Great Power armies intervened with overwhelming strength and firepower. Another cliché, still common on the left, is that Marx and Engels dismissed 1848 in ...”

“... in a way that invalidates her literary aspirations. At the chapter’s end the little kick of self-reference would land more effectively – unless you think it’s coincidental that Desai’s first novel was called Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. (Her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006.) The college is closed over the winter ...”

“... will still have four years and eleven months to serve. In his prison diary, his latest attempt at self-exculpation, he tells us he was overcome with relief when the courts agreed to hear his appeal, which he took as proof of his blamelessness. But that’s not obvious to his readers: Sarkozy is still entangled in a skein of allegations and his efforts to cut ...”

“... Here was the old business, being carried on by the old firm, in the old ways.’ There was a self-mortifying thrill for upper-crust Anglicans in rubbing shoulders with Irish navvies or soldiers, who personified Rome’s demotic offer of grace. Benson, who followed Tyrrell in being an Anglican clergyman turned Catholic priest, trilled that the peasantry ...”

“... of the husband is getting shakier every day.’ Gazing at the horizon, she pistons forward on a self-imposed treadmill: a comrade-athlete driving, by force of will, the engine of the city. This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston ...”

“... inquests in which the corpse pretends to be the coroner’, but whatever self-justifications he might have entered as evidence, the reading of his file is hampered by his absence. It is an unwritten rule of MI5 that Personal Files (PFs) are only released after their subjects have died. Another unwritten rule, among so many, is that it ...”

“... of collective inertia. Purdy contemplates ‘the ideal of Anthropocene democracy’: ‘Self-aware, collective engagement with the question of what kinds of landscapes, what kind of atmosphere and climate, and what kind of world-shaping habitation to pursue would all be parts of the repertoire of ...”

“... diagnosis. Within the individual there were two contrary bents, one towards a sturdy spiritual ‘self-employment’ in a life of adventure, the other towards a menial ‘partnership’ for the reception of benefits – and such were the springs of the two types of government, which could not be reconciled. All of Oakeshott’s imposing erudition ends in the ...”

“... your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of ‘self’ knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won’t. Or you will feel – with rage, or sorrow, or relief – that it has been made for you. But the fantasy of choice quickly begins to dissipate ...”

“... deep, familiar, in-the-grain affair. Nowhere in its vicinity could you find a reassuring alloy of self-love. The broad iconoclasm led some of his fans to hope for political satire, but, with allowances for bile, he was essentially a New Deal liberal and outwardly as unpolitical as Will Rogers, whom he would come to know and like. A revealing exception ...”

“... turn sardonic. He is listening to old Dedalus, in the cab taking them to the funeral (87): Noisy self-willed man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must ...”

“... he would preach. The highest values were knowledge (as opposed to understanding), duty and self-control, in a harmony of which music was the ritual expression. The basic duty was consideration for others, according to their rank. Rulers were owed obedience by their subjects, as parents by their children, and husbands by their wives. But should they ...”

“... of things drew him into the movement: his childhood experience of racist murders, an instinct for self-defence, and the charismatic influence of the Panther members from Chicago who visited North Carolina to inspire younger black men to force a change in the fabric of America, and, Terry said as the truck sped forward into the Alabama sun, ‘to kill a few ...”