“... always deal with the counter-arguments to her doomy, march-of-the-jellyfish thesis, weak and self-interested though they often are. I would have liked to see her address the criticisms of the Boris Worm school of fishery biologists more effectively, since they are often hard for the non-specialist to follow; the sections on global warming would not, I ...”

“... a pawn of the larger realms of England, France and Spain, until religious alignment, political self-interest and dynastic accident led to the union of the English and Scottish crowns in the person of James IV’s great-grandson and Henry VIII’s great-great-nephew, James VI and I, in 1603. Defeat has not helped shape the national psyche in England as it ...”

“... then I sensed that my father’s quiet life in the Suffolk countryside was serving as belated, self-administered therapy. In my childhood we did not travel far (my father had had quite enough of that). One year, going west, we stopped at Winchester College, his school. He’d never seen the War Cloister, built in 1924. He stood apart, slowly reading down ...”

“... into narrative, across several notebooks, in spiritual autobiographies that articulate a sense of self by recycling biblical scripts or searching minutiae for signs of God’s grace. Aubrey wrote that his brief outline autobiography was ‘to be interponed [inserted] as a sheet of wast-paper only in the binding of a Booke’. The urge to write a life often ...”

“... though unforeseen, consequence of those radical 1960s ideas of valuing individuals and encouraging self-expression and confidence. But, as Seamus Heaney put it, striving to write well helps tune the ear to the hum of a writer. It can illuminate how language works and how stories carry meaning. Digging into the archaeology of a story, into the structure of a ...”

“... he was too melancholy for cold warriors in either country to take seriously. Regular calls from self-satisfied German intellectuals for his father’s return turned the ambivalence Klaus had always felt towards Thomas Mann into alienation. When Klaus committed suicide in Cannes in May 1949, it was left to his sister Erika to spell out the meaning of the ...”

“... ever ready with a fag and a corkscrew, always smiling, profoundly witty, and well on the way to self-ruin. This is accurate as far as it goes. But any serious view of Lambert’s music ought to take us further. As a composer, he suffered not from lack of brilliance or substance, but from going against the historical moment. Like Britten (whom he ...”

“... made of him, or the archetypal lost boy his mother mourns for, or the missing half of Elinor’s self (we learn that he did have a twin, a girl, who was flattened in the womb as he grew – a rare ‘papyrus twin’, preserved in a bottle in a lab somewhere). Buried even more deeply in the trilogy than the secret of Toby’s homosexuality (which readers ...”

“... a libertarian, and said: ‘Trump is not part of the corrupt establishment. A total outsider. Self-funded his primary campaign. Didn’t take money from Goldman Sachs and the corrupt banks like every other candidate. Isn’t owned and operated by anyone but himself. Isn’t part of either corrupt “party”. Isn’t a politician. Doesn’t use political ...”

“... led by Ngo Dinh Diem, known at the time thanks to the global circulation of photographs of self-immolating monks, are a case in point. The majority of Western observers in the 1960s and later, who saw the conflict through a Cold War lens, perceived religion as a minor element in these protests. Diem’s Catholicism was widely known but seen as a ...”

“... of an awareness that ‘oaths and vows are … means not just of assurance but of deception and self-deception.’ And the question keeps recurring. ‘Does binding language bind?’ Yes, but it is ‘naively unhistorical’ to ‘assume that binding language ought always to bind’. Shylock himself is defeated by his own ‘unbindable binding ...”

“... of a union threatened by insurgencies in the resource-rich borderlands. Their vision of a self-supporting state, free from foreign intervention, was reified in the Burmese Road to Socialism, the blueprint for a command economy based on Buddhism, autarky and astrology that impoverished the country. The Rohingyas were ethnically ...”

“... and car drivers to find their destinations automatically, and enables the existence of the new self-driving cars, in addition to its many military uses. Another Darpa project was the Aspen Movie Map, a virtual tour of Aspen provided by the first hypermedia system (four cameras rigged on the top of a car taking pictures every ten feet). This technology was ...”

“... liver damage from alcohol, and COPD from smoking, and other chronic illnesses of unhappiness and self-neglect. When the first Trainspotting film came out in 1996, I went to see it on my own at the Brixton Ritzy. It was everything people say it was, but it didn’t do much for me. A brilliant piece of multidimensional brand strategising, I felt it was, ideas ...”

“... Who knew nothing, or wasn’t asked.There is a lot of formal travel between a cryptic, slightly self-mocking portrait like this one: Wandering this way and that Kept no note of my hither and thither Don’t know where I left my hat Nor the previous seven eitherand the unprotected sweep of Everything was beautiful on that sole evening, ma soeur After it ...”