“... of Harrison’s first and fourth watches are perfectly understandable in this light: it was never self-evident that voyages across the Atlantic, or up the Channel or in Maskelyne’s rooms in Greenwich, represented accurately enough the conditions any clock would encounter in everyday use on the high seas. To get this kind of accuracy it was also crucial to ...”

“... campaign for ‘scientific method in philosophy’, and Rudolf Carnap, writing in a self-consciously Russellian vein, claim that ‘the new type of philosophy has arisen in close contact with the work of the special sciences, especially mathematics and physics. Consequently they have taken the strict and responsible orientation of the scientific ...”

“... would be an effective rejoinder to the anti-abolitionists who claimed Africans were incapable of self-government. After months of delay and prevarication, 459 passengers finally set sail in April 1787. Unfortunately they arrived at the start of the rainy season; about a third died, and the rest quarrelled with their African neighbours, who burned down their ...”

“... in a regime of coitus interruptus were involved in essentially the same “game” of sexual self-restraint as those practising the various forms of conscious abstinence.’ This is an unorthodox and arresting way to see the matter, but surprisingly persuasive – in the tradition of Peter Laslett’s penetrating commonsense insights. Couples do not have ...”

“... understand the notion of scruple, can’t contemplate the possibility of anything other than self-interest governing the world. Mrs Thatcher didn’t cause this mentality, didn’t herself entirely espouse it, although she did benefit by it, and she did give it a lot of air. I think of the child in Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’ who has never ...”

“... grain of what they liked to call ‘healthy popular feeling’. The death penalty became ‘racial self-defence’. Even before the radicalising impact of war, executions became more numerous, more arbitrary and more triumphalist. After 1939, tens of thousands of quasi-judicial killings were sanctioned by regular courts, ‘special courts’ and military ...”

“... meant he could be demobbed earlier than he had hoped. For Cobb, the most important meanings are self-referential (even selfish), local, ungeneralisable, private. As he struggles to write the last pages of these mémoires d’outre-tombe, the sentences start to shorten and become less baroque, the syntax to slacken; the world of the real is invaded by an ...”

“... and the inexplicable, a desire less for economic advantage than for predictability, modest self-sufficiency and local control. Where the microhistories of Ginzburg and Davis attempt to probe with increasing intimacy the minds of their highly individuated and particularised subjects, Levi’s study moves in precisely the opposite direction. He doesn’t ...”

“... and cruelties. Evangelical literature is full of accounts of the pioneer missionaries’ acts of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. But secular observers, anthropologists for the most part, while not necessarily unsympathetic to missionary enterprise, have rightly been more concerned with their effect on Indian lives – effects to which the missionaries ...”

“... 155 mm shells and they are highly mobile. The G5 can be towed around very fast, while the G6 is self-propelled. For months they had poured shells onto the plain, which was now disarmingly quiet. The battle for Cuito Cuanavale was all but finished; the land seemed to be re-emerging in its aftermath like an enormous plaster relief from which the mould is only ...”

“... But as with his previous volumes, it is hard to tell exactly what his opinions are. The most self-effacing of all biographers, he has adopted the method of allowing the documents to speak for themselves. Since most of the documents are letters or speeches by the great man, or snatches from his conversation, Churchill’s perceptions dominate the ...”

“... which brings no strainings, poppings, wheezings or squeezings – and which casts no shadow on her self-esteem. Its main consequence is to draw people to her. She invites trust and confidences: colleagues, fellow lodgers and the most glamorous of authors all turn to Mrs Hawkins for advice. Her advice is never less than stringent. ‘It is my advice to any ...”

“... it ‘as a transition period from school to the real world’), he has to discover a source of self-respect independent of his now-defunct military rank. The problems of adjustment are highlighted in the absurd incident, retailed in his book, in which the ex-Para policeman offers to fight him, even though he is in a wheelchair. Robert comments: ‘Time and ...”

“... to what was being alleged to their detriment, so every sporting picture, by representing the self-image of the sporting world, also embodied an account of the view of sport which that image was an attempt to deny or to ignore. The history Deuchar proposes has four phases. The first, in the early decades of the century, is treated as more or less a ...”

“... tastes – are intended to suggest that any theoretical framework Brook might come up with is self-serving. In 1973, Brook described the purpose of assembling his Paris company. It was not a skills swapshop, each member displaying his tricks and operating ‘an exchange of techniques’. Rather, Brook said, ‘we are seeking for what gives a form of ...”