“... 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 ...”

“... Such is the contract signed by most people who come here to live, work and play – to go for it, self-invent, hang on – and, paradoxically perhaps, this contract is also a kind of bond, a form of connection to people who came earlier to attempt these same things.The victims must be honoured, of course, and the families have insisted from the start that a ...”

“... emotions of the British, though, is that it risks treating the psychic toll of collapsing national self-image as more important than the experiences of colonial subjects. Aside from a brief overview of the origins of the three colonial wars, this isn’t really a book about those conflicts or the people who lived through them. And while it is an important ...”

“... consent gets a rather poor showing in the poem) the successful antagonist of the Father is a self-contradiction. It is not enough to say that it was reasonable of Adam and Eve to want to know, and simply wicked of God to make knowledge a forbidden thing. Milton’s God, who must be allowed some authority, says that it would have been better for them to ...”

“... woman’ who worked as a newspaper journalist, but as her marriage with X went on, she became more self-confident, as Adler was when she reviewed Kael, but also more subservient: she did the cooking, she told the biographers to cease and desist, she accepted that if she left the apartment in the middle of dinner to fetch parmesan, X might not be there when she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the half-deserted Mamallapuram. From first to last, Britain’s trade policy was ruthlessly self-seeking. As Lord William Bentinck said of the consequences of allowing textiles from British mills into India: ‘The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’But Dalrymple ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 18th century have demonstrated in their different ways; it can also be the lifeblood of political self-knowledge and understanding. Cora’s Southampton inaugural address was also about heroism – one of the key links between these two extraordinary papers – as if she were saying that the register of affect must now take another turn. It must address the ...”

“... memorable over the lifetime of an editor or his magazine. On the other hand, it isn’t at all self-evident, not to me at least, that a bad or mediocre book is superior to an effective or interesting book review simply on the grounds that a book is a book and the authors of books are nearer to God than the authors of reviews. No one would deny that reviews ...”

“... something. Yet Coll also shows that Saddam was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the ...”

“... the Sixties, no country, whatever the system, was an island. Even though France and Britain were self-sufficient in whole blood and committed to voluntary, unpaid donation, both countries bought blood products in an international market dominated by multinational, mostly US-based companies. Whole blood was banked and credits were traded within ...”