“... for her.’ Discussions of this kind appear throughout the book, with an engaging lack of self-consciousness. Weldon also has an interest in recurring dreams, in premonitions, fate, tarot cards and the power of coincidence – themes that will be familiar to readers of her novels but which they might not have expected to figure so prominently in her ...”

“... The dwindling band of Keynesians in the Labour Party take the name not of Labour’s most self-consciously Keynesian Chancellor, but that of his successor, Hugh Gaitskell. Clarke makes clear just what an odd fish Cripps must have seemed: That [by 1939] he should have become a left-wing socialist was a paradox. That he should have become a teetotaller ...”

“... the end of the 19th century things had become impossibly tangled. Pierre Loti’s ‘vertiginously self-reflexive fiction’ came close to autobiography. Les Désenchantées, published in 1906, was based on the testimony of two Turkish sisters who had decided to break the monotony of their existence by setting up clandestine meetings with Loti; they were among ...”

“... offered to do his legal work for nothing. Eventually he became DiMaggio’s shadow and the self-styled ‘son he never had’, a designation that gets more meaningful when one reads about the decline of Joe Jr, the son DiMaggio did have, and rejected. Cramer is barely able to contain himself when he’s writing about Engelberg, regularly appending the ...”

“... extinction. He hoped that the development of new satellite suburbs – clusters of interconnected, self-sufficient, ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ – would slowly empty out the capital. London’s property bubble would burst; rents would fall; and the slums would be pulled down to make way for parks, gardens and allotments: ‘the country,’ Howard ...”

“... Carter is shrewdly sceptical, and the use she makes of Rees or Straight, to say nothing of the self-serving memoirs of Blunt’s NKVD contact Yuri Modin and the grievance-twisted outpourings of Peter Wright, is exceedingly judicious. Indeed, the book can be read not only as a biography but as an exemplary account of the unreliability of interested ...”

“... potential of land and its vegetation for its own use.’ While any society is and was capable of self-defeating deforestation, European expansion changed the rules: local or regional economies became increasingly connected, with clear consequences for forests as the European (and later North American) demand grew for the resources of the newly discovered ...”

“... penny had dropped. I might have mentioned Freud or Melanie Klein. Or the terrible isolation of the self-aware individual and the horror of the certainty of absolute extinction. Or false consciousness. But I said: ‘Oh.’ I said it as weakly as I could, trying not to imply either that her reasoning had cleared the mists in my mind to revelation, or that I was ...”

“... individualism’ (thanks to the introduction of European firearms), a ‘new sense of self’ (thanks to European mirrors), and a rise in ‘male vanity’ (thanks to imported cosmetics). Such claims are asserted rather than demonstrated; to a reader they feel like interpretive missiles launched without plan or preparation from some authorial ...”

“... White House. Serving as Bush’s science adviser since near the beginning of his first term is a self-described Democrat, John Marburger III, a physicist and former university president. Unstinting in his repeated defence of the Bush administration’s maltreatment of science, Marburger is described by Mooney as ‘a rather tragic figure’. Yes, but ...”

“... in India it is 64. The villages we happened to see in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces appeared to be self-sustaining farming communities, without the visible suffering of similar hamlets in India or Latin America. The Tibetans in these provinces – unlike, by most accounts, those in Tibet – seemed to be thriving, no doubt because they are an unthreatening ...”

“... that of L’Etranger – but his sense of displacement remains. Navigation of a Rainmaker has the self-importance of a work that knows the significance of its themes. Often this leads Mahjoub to try to squeeze too much life out of his images: ‘The map of the Sudan looked like a face, the face of a man gazing down; the face of a man in mourning.’ More ...”

“... of some of his less endearing characteristics. He even says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the ...”

“... found themselves outside the state church. Calvinism could survive within congregations of the self-selected godly, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Muggletonian. But it had never been popular with the ‘loose multitude’, for whom the Church of England still had to cater, and after the Interregnum it lost much of its appeal for the ...”

“... expense – by helping small firms, by encouraging worker co-operatives, by giving incentives to self-employment, by penalising energy-intensive technologies and fostering labour-intensive ones, by working with the social forces which are steadily enlarging the ‘black economy’ instead of against them. The second, however, is that such measures cannot ...”