“... allowing him to face the statue of the Commander with such courage, Molière seemed to exceed his self-imposed brief to attack the singers, not the song. What conviction drove him to fight a cause which endangered himself and imperilled his actors? Scott, concerned primarily with the emotional truth about Molière, shows much less curiosity about his beliefs ...”

“... lives, helps them; and it is not for her or for any other outsider to suggest that they may be self-deceived, or ill-informed politically, or psychologically naive. She keeps to herself her scepticism when her interviewees themselves proudly invoke the tradition of an immemorial Russian stoicism to explain their own or others’ capacity to live through ...”

“... profiteers who stayed at home, a chancer, a coward prepared to bully the weak to make his small self seem larger. In 1978, three years before he died, he gave an interview to L’Express, which Callil translates. In it he denies the Holocaust, saying that all the evidence for it is Jewish propaganda and lies. Anyway, he says, his task was to supply ...”

“... of the stars in Latin. But the seal barking away on the top of Evelyn’s headboard was his self-illustrated, thousand-page magnum opus on gardens, Elysium Britannicum. Sylva grew but the Elysium exploded. He included anything which could conceivably come under the heading of gardening, from the elements to compost, apiculture to hydraulics, classical ...”

“... there? Is it Samson the hero, Samson the lummox, or Samson the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson ...”

“... wide range of reference and graciousness towards others is that it does not entirely work as a self-contained study of legal reasoning. In many cases one needs to trace the arguments backwards to see why the protagonists, including MacCormick, are saying what they are saying. It is partly to lend some unity to the many fragments of debate thus collected ...”

“... that the physical destruction of ancient Sparta would have been a less decisive blow to Spartan self-identity than the same destruction would have been to the Athenians? Do all cultures, or the same cultures at different times, invest the same beliefs in a strong correlation between what they build and who they are? Theorists and legislators have wrestled ...”

“... incest, involving respectively his valet and sister. The murder is generally accepted as an act of self-defence against a deranged servant, but according to Major Jones, who wrote down what he described as the Duke’s ‘confidence’, Ernst claimed that he had to ‘destroy’ his valet because he ‘threatened to propagate a report, and I had no ...”

“... or widowed woman with a little cash in the bank. My mother was partial to Lyons’s teashops, self-service, though with nice ladies who poured the tea from big metal pots, and often enough another woman sitting at our table to whom my mother could get talking and tell her miserable fortune to. These were public teapot teas, where we pretended that we were ...”

“... These live-in fantasies were the acme of American hyper-realism – the media-saturated world of self-referential signs, the endless round of simulations without an original: just the sort of substitute for history that Hollywood Flatlands so brilliantly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... horizon between myth and history’, the ‘passage from myth to history’, as if it were self-evident that this was a concept familiar to the Greeks and Romans, and the only question were where in time it should be placed. Feeney knows that ‘more and more scholars nowadays are inclined to deny that there is much value in the language of “mythical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there be cause to wonder whether Poe’s drinking, a form of temporary and finally irrevocable self-obliteration, had something to do with a disturbed sexuality – the result of a complex of experiences with women that began with his mother’s death? Eliza Poe had married first at 15; when she died, she was a 24-year-old mother of three, deserted during ...”