“... anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright insane. If there is any consensus, it is that Sicily is changing. The island has begun to resume the status it once enjoyed as a centre of Mediterranean civilisation. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, flood onto the mainland ...”

“... characteristic of scientific revolutions. These twin associations illustrate Brandom’s schizoid self-image as the revolutionary – ‘opposed to many (if not most) of the large theoretical, explanatory and strategic commitments that have shaped and motivated Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th century’ – but also as the spokesman and latest member of ...”

“... he has written a thoroughly entertaining, absorbing account of their mostly misguided and often self-important activities. Whether or not Waldorf Astor’s father, William Waldorf, the first Lord Astor, approved of his son’s marriage to Nancy Shaw – he did not go to the wedding on the grounds of ‘poor health’ – he was not niggardly with his ...”

“... replied, despite these same channels’ allegations of censorship under the previous regime. Now self-censorship in the form of soap operas stopped them showing what was slowly emerging as a pro-Chávez multitude. Then one channel suddenly switched to the scene in the street outside its own headquarters. A group of young demonstrators, on motorcycles and ...”

“... natural history of the New World, and beginning extensive new studies of British invertebrates. Self-education accompanied the education of others, as it would throughout his life. His spiritual life also began to take new directions. It was during his London years that Gosse acquired a belief in the imminence of the Second Coming, when Christ would ‘send ...”

“... She surely knew that her prose had to sign itself. Her essays, both in texture and content, were self-advertisements. She was pushing a project: her own kind of novel. She argued against the heavy, mercantile realism of Edwardian novelists such as Bennett and Galsworthy, writers who, it seemed to her, only notarised their characters by listing their ...”

“... framed and illuminated in medieval script, hanging balefully on the wall as an exhortation to self-improvement’ – though I’ve never seen one of these myself. Most people have at one time or another fallen under Kipling’s spell, if only in bastardised Boy Scout or Disney versions. I was bewitched by the Just So Stories as a child, and exhilarated ...”

“... or a doctrine’. He complains that my objection to Thatcherism could have been that ‘its self-consciously “ideological” approach to politics was in itself what made it un-Conservative,’ but my ‘critique was targeted at the kind of ideology Thatcherism embodied.’ That is a fair point, but well before Thatcherism had emerged I had expressed ...”

“... doubt the mysteries of her identity are an essential part of the appeal. The various solutions are self-cancelling: in a sense she has less identity now than she did a hundred years ago, when everyone cheerfully accepted the Vasari version. The face in the portrait is ‘indeterminate’, Sassoon observes, and so becomes a ‘terrain for infinite ...”

“... is the puritan insistence that what matters is what’s ‘inside’. To avoid being typecast, the self is dematerialised. The external trappings of human beings are discarded as so much dross. In Kantian style, freedom and value lie within, not in the degraded world of phenomena. It is hard to know how to avoid the more odious forms of stereotyping without ...”

“... by a need, on the one hand, and an ambition, on the other. The need is to prevent the rhythmic, self-destructive fluttering that can be generated when the cadence of a live load (marching men, wind-driven eddies) matches one of the bridge’s modes of vibration. The ambition is to cross wider spans with lighter, more economical structures. The two aims are ...”

“... George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of what exists to the possibilities of economic and social change. Novels quite often time travel under the heading of movement from ...”

“... and Alexis de Tocqueville grew up in a family where legitimism did not arise simply from material self-interest, aristocratic haughtiness or ideological prescription, but drew also on intimate experience of imprisonment and loss. After the second and irrevocable expulsion of the Bourbons in 1830, Tocqueville would break – outwardly at least and not without ...”

“... and it is difficult at first to grasp the full horror of events. Isis, with a new baby and a self-absorbed schoolteacher husband in the throes of Freudian analysis, developed a passionate crush on her GP. The doctor seemed, perhaps, to return her feelings. He once held her hand slightly longer than was necessary and he was kind about her baby, who was ...”

“... verdict was straightforward: suicide. The unexpected death of this apparently serene and self-controlled man, particularly the violent and dramatic nature of it, at first stunned his readers, but within weeks the event had come to be regarded as inevitable. The consensus, in the words of Levi’s friend Ferdinando Camon, was that Levi’s suicide ...”