“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... grand scale, and everyone knows it is; the Saudis seem to live, at times, in a national frenzy of self-hatred, attracted to Western culture while despising it, and despising themselves for being attracted. When they look in the mirror, a foreigner and a devil looks back. In the past, other Arabs regarded the desert people as backward and deprived: but the ...”

“... The implication in Willinsky’s verdict is that future mutations of OED will be much less self-mystified than their deluded predecessors. The problem is, however, that works of such magnitude are only undertaken by those deluded to the point of fanaticism (like the Mormons and their gigantic genealogical database in Salt Lake City). The ...”

“... as to suggest (unofficially) that it might be illegal for Somalis to fire on UN troops, even in self-defence. Although it fell short of this absurdity, the UN did in fact conflate jus ad bellum with the jus in bello, and – as they did not do in the case of anti-colonial liberation struggles – made this a legal reality. In a little-noticed precedent, the ...”

“... onto the floral carpet. The effect was both emotive and grotesque, an overblown rhetoric of grief. Self-aggrandising tributes to a man who had been, for years, a chemically palliated zombie; a man whose humanity had died with his victims. In a sense, he couldn’t die: he was dead already, estranged from himself. Victim and servant of the voices in his ...”

“... to do with the beauty or otherwise of one’s body, but everything to do with one’s sense of self. If I have no control over what is known about me, I am seriously diminished as a person both in my own eyes and in those which are capable of intruding upon me.’ As one gets further into the book it becomes clear that, for the authors, the right of the ...”

“... the familiar argument against this theory doesn’t itself make sense. There’s no escape from self-defeat once we see that to say that a statement corresponds to a fact in the world requires us to state what that fact is. (This is why the deeply disappointing disquotational theory of truth, that ‘S is true’ if and only if S is true, is thought to be ...”

“... at imagining deathbeds, including his own (‘The Cottage Hospital’), but he was also a shrewd self-critic. Textually, the letters contain much that will be important to Betjeman scholars if not to the general reader. In the correspondence of December 1947, we come across something like a running commentary on the poem which finally appeared as ‘Sunday ...”

“... Eminent Victorians, published in 1918. Of Strachey’s chosen targets, Cardinal Manning was a self-deceiving hypocrite, Dr Thomas Arnold the epitome of earnest Victorianism, who modelled his pedagogic vision on Jehovah’s relations with the Israelites, Florence Nightingale a bedridden female tyrant who drove her devoted male acolytes to early death, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”