“... 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 ...”

“... the boundaries between rationality and superstition goes back to Horace Walpole’s sober and self-conscious preface to The Castle of Otranto, which suggests that the spooky manuscript was composed by a priest ‘to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’. Soviet Gothic writers took aim at superstitions that were distinctly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in The Waves. Her ‘adhesion’ to the fluid, changeful, venturesome world below has generated a self-assurance bordering on complacency. ‘Therefore I will powder my face and redden my lips. I will make the angle of my eyebrows sharper than usual. I will rise to the surface, standing erect with the others in Piccadilly Circus.’ For Welsh, underground ...”

“... for turning the new policy into practice. For while nationality had not usually been a means of self-identification in the region until well into the 20th century, the Bolshevik leaders saw its development as politically necessary: the only means by which ‘real’ class tension could be exposed and overcome. The national-territorial delimitation of ...”

“... listening – might simply mean that life as we know it is rare, not that civilisations inevitably self-destruct in nuclear holocaust. Where Cocconi and Morrison assumed that intelligent civilisations would inevitably pursue scientific investigations, Davies counters that science is not universal, even here on earth. Moreover, the idea, common in the 1950s and ...”

“... not to let that stand in his way. He does, after all, have the Hand of God on his side. The self-importance of the Fifa high-ups is perhaps best gauged by the fact that its head, Sepp Blatter, is allowed to move through airports with no need to show a passport or for any of the usual customs and immigration procedures, a privilege he shares only with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but backhandedly compared his writing to self-satirising chinoiserie. ‘Forgetting Elena is a masterful piece of work, I have no doubt of that,’ Friedman wrote. ‘The trouble lies in the contrivance.’ Though the language at times was ‘uncannily beautiful’, the narrator was ‘unfailingly ...”

“... to questions is no longer revolutionary. That’s why these demonstrations have no leaders and are self-disciplined. Everyone is equal.’ Where the Tunisian revolution goes from here is unclear. Three days of protests finally persuaded Mohamed Ghannouchi, who served for 12 years as prime minister under Ben-Ali, to resign on 27 February. Six other ministers ...”

“... Germans and Japanese didn’t follow this course, apart from the belief that security rested on self-sufficiency, was that it would have meant scaling down their allegedly idyllic agricultural sectors, which had become central to their national ideologies – ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ and all that. But it left America and the Commonwealth with the ...”

“... beside the quays did not survive the onslaught of nation, race and sect. Diversity and simple self-interest were replaced by demagoguery, tribalism and nationalism and islands of diversity and mutual tolerance began to disappear. Philip Mansel documents the rise and inexorable crash of the great Levantine entrepôts as four centuries of relative stability ...”

“... But he was also vain, dogmatic, wanton, occasionally belligerent and always liable to abject self-pity. Italian culture enjoyed wider prestige in the educated circles of the Regency period than it commands today. So Foscolo was welcomed and courted both as a creative writer – plenty of people, specially women, could and did read his work in the ...”

“... his anti-managerial style – was judged to be a way of dealing with such an embarrassment of self-aware talent. The lab’s governing board comprised the four Nobel laureates, with Perutz wisely named as chairman, not director. Kendrew, Sanger and Crick each headed one of the lab’s three divisions. Himsworth of the MRC had earlier proposed this type of ...”

“... declared a ceasefire on 14 October last year – had been ignored. They said they were fighting in self-defence and in retaliation against attacks by the Turkish army. A woman called Mizgin Amed, introduced as a PKK leader, said: ‘Even an animal – any living thing – will fight when it feels it is in a dangerous situation.’ She and a PKK ...”