“... Observatory tended to opt for hierarchically organised networks crowned by their own institutions. Self-registering instruments that worked around the clock without complaint appealed to them, as did human observers who approximated machines as closely as possible. These would-be managers of science spoke with Bounderby-esque good cheer about human drudges who ...”

“... the same resources as 18th-century plots. ‘Ah Gracious powers!’ Thackeray’s narrator sighs self-parodically, ‘I wish you would send an old aunt – a maiden aunt – an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage, and a front of light coffee-coloured hair.’ The dream did not change much. The same could be said for the plot conclusions Perry claims are ...”

“... relatively obvious. Hunt was a fast worker judged by volume of output. He allowed deadlines, often self-imposed, to affect quality. (Not very much of his work is negligible, but enough to make him, and us, bewail the pressure of time.) He was an inveterate reissuer of things he judged, or even faintly hoped, would stand a second airing, straight or ...”

“... tariff barriers, eventually facilitated national recoveries – emphasis was placed on economic self-sufficiency. Steiner also deals here with Hitler’s rise to the German Chancellorship, for which mass bankruptcies and unemployment were a necessary precondition. In contrast, her second section plays down the importance of the Japanese Kwantung Army’s ...”

“... Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century British knew best through the medium of Addison’s popular tragedy Cato (1713 ...”

“... card games resembling modern French Tarot in one or more fairly obvious ways. But it is not self-evident that either card games, as such, or European card games, as such, make a particularly interesting category. The point I am making here is implicit in Dummett’s remarks at page 63, where he notes with some surprise (and perhaps irritation) that ...”

“... either shameless or vain shall not deter him. Geoffrey Wolff might have made the same promise: his self-portrait as a show-off, know-all, flippant brat is courageous, but no more so than his presentation of himself, at the beginning of the book and the end, not just as a survivor – which under the circumstances would have been quite an achievement in itself ...”

“... done harm at the time, for she conned women in the same way that Samuel Smiles conned men when in Self-Help he persuaded them that any man could, say, build the Scott Monument or discover vaccination. In blustering across ravines, neither Grand nor Smiles seemed to see that as long as ravines were there many people would fall into them. Grand would certainly ...”

“... Laon case seems to have been a direct model for both the others. The precise mixture of neurosis, self-deception and outright fraud in each case cannot be exactly reconstructed, but all these elements were certainly present among the demoniacs and their entourages. The possession of Marthe Brossier was much the most significant, timed as it was to coincide ...”

“... unravelling the details of these long-forgotten scandals, Cockayne follows the convolutions of self-interested gossip that could extend over generations. Family secrets mattered, especially if they involved illegitimate offspring. The Countess of Coventry was exasperated to receive a letter from ‘a well-wisher’ in 1815, referring to ‘the gaiety of ...”

“... I’ve had to bear if I had lived in any other country. Here, we are never left by our lone [sic] self … We have a very united collective at our lab. We all help each other.’For all these differences, material and ideological, the two women were curious about each other’s choices. Melnikovskaya wanted better to understand Jahr’s decision not to ...”

“... but Tóibín gives it five pages all the same. And Eilis is a remodelled Jamesian heroine: smart, self-educated, unsure where she belongs. True, she’s not a sophisticate (in twenty years in the US she hasn’t once stayed in a hotel), but her visit to Ireland, against her husband’s wishes, is reminiscent of Isabel Archer’s in The Portrait of a ...”

“... in administering justice, but as an effective means of educating the people in the practice of self-government. The social and political role of the legal profession was also important. In a remarkable passage, Tocqueville argued that lawyers provide powerful security against democratic excess because they are the only group in a democracy that can bind ...”

“... doves that thud onto the dinner table during a disastrous debutante ball reappear as emblems of self-actualisation. ‘Whenever I was truly happy,’ Peggy says, ‘I pictured black birds falling from the ceiling.’ The novel can seem in excess of itself – its attention span flickers, there are too many names and places and threads – but it’s also ...”