“... New Jersey, malls have become the place of choice to meet for immigrant housewives with a sense of self,’ the novelist Bharati Mukherjee observes. ‘Driving to the mall is itself an empowering adventure. Not to be at home, cooking for husband and children? Not to be ministering to husband’s mother? To be so selfish? Back in India most women didn’t ...”

“... in spite of the mix-and-match approach, is there anyone whose problems are worth examining from a self-help point of view – which is where you are likely to find this book in a bookshop. We are not meant to think like that, however. Nor are we meant to think too hard about the efficacy (or otherwise) of the so-called talking cure. Orbach writes with such ...”

“... of the Scottish Enlightenment in the evolution of the Whig tradition. Indeed, iconoclasts from the self-confident peripheries who debunk Old England’s identity and past glories often invoke Pocock’s name; but they cannot count him among their number. On the contrary, Pocock flags up achievements scarcely imagined by the most John Bullish of ...”

“... Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ‘this Treasury’s’ traditional policies. That New Labour should end up like this is as depressing an outcome as can be imagined. I suspect that ...”

“... Second World War had started, she continues the theme, with the suicide of nations and Europe’s self-destruction in the ongoing war. After the war, she was convinced that when Britain backed Tito rather than Mihailovitch to be leader of Yugoslavia a gross mistake was made. (The editor of the letters might have given a fuller account of this crucial ...”

“... patients on Miltown became much less anxious. The difference was that doctors in this clinic had self-consciously adopted an enthusiastic, confident attitude towards the drug’s effectiveness. When they switched to a more neutral, experimental attitude, Miltown was no better than a placebo. A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard ...”

“... without a mediological analysis of their differences, have simply been collapsed into a single self-identical entity called ‘God’. But first, He who started it all: why did the Eternal One arrive so late? What was He doing during the 1.4 million years since the Acheulean carvings in Africa? Or the half million years since humans harnessed fire? Or the ...”

“... from false sense that reason took its rise? If what the senses tell us is not true Then reason’s self is naught but falsehood too. Can ears deliver verdict on the eyes? Can touch convict the ears, or taste the touch, of lies? Ancient Philosophy accords a good deal of attention to the philosophy of the Hellenistic period (the three centuries following the ...”

“... impersonal. Rodger’s underlying purpose in this trilogy is to make clear that there can be no self-contained organisational history of the Royal Navy, and that naval affairs must be reinserted into a broad-ranging history of Britain as a whole. In keeping with this, he shows that command of the oceans was more the product of changes on land than at ...”

“... The great Western empires, which depended on the consent of the governed, faced demands for self-government. Yet without the war, the changes might have taken different, less violent directions. European society would not have been brutalised by four years of slaughter and hatred. Russia might well have avoided Bolshevism. When the Soviet Union finally ...”

“... as the other story was overloaded with the fish. The old-fashioned effect of this newfangled self-exposure is a rather unexpected simplicity. The wasps’ nest is … what? The surgeon’s now broken family? His life? His wife? Liberated from soft implication, it brazenly exceeds these questions rather as the Lone Survivor also flies away, and we are ...”

“... view to challenging his account. Poor Law officials and charitable workers delivered themselves of self-justification and soul-searching in equal measure, while their clients in turn argued about Greenwood’s claims. A few of his characters – the old inmate known as ‘Daddy’ who monitored the baths and assigned sleeping places, and the young and depraved ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was still alive? Either way, Edward seems to have coped superbly, testimony to the courage and self-confidence that this biography ...”