“... an adult. Terah had been an even-handed father; the death of his wife sees him grow irascible and self-absorbed. Abram needs a wife, Terah hopes for grandchildren and he has few scruples about forcing Sarai into marriage: ‘you are different from my other children, apart from them, born from another womb.’ The offhand comment divides them – Sarai feels ...”

“... free their tangled members is for one of them to bite his off at the base. From that moment, the self-castrated slug is female-only. Sometimes a male xylocoris, a close relative of the bedbug, will rape another male. Its sperm will make its way to the victim’s vas deferens, where sperm are stored. The next time the raped male inseminates a female, the ...”

“... ingrained in us now. So, positively, are Darwin’s demonstrations of how life works, how its ‘self-developing energies’ unfold, in that unobtrusive phrase from his diary which at once disposes of all that is supernatural and plants us in the world as it really is. Atomic nuclei are split, genes are inserted into or removed from organisms – such ...”

“... be that de Gaulle had the right idea. His notion was that Francophone Africa should accede to full self-government but, stopping short of complete independence, should leave defence and foreign affairs in French hands. The key point was that such a formula would allow these countries to continue to receive large amounts of French aid in every sphere, to stay ...”

“... or appearance but something more elusive. Yet a tension remains between her sense of the fluid self and her reluctance to abandon the traditional concept of character, for while human complexity must be acknowledged, we also need to identify difference, and character remains a convenient shorthand for doing so. While Beard’s suspicion of conventional ...”

“... To eradicate it he advocated a ban on foreign trade, deindustrialisation and the promotion of a self-sufficient agrarian economy. Far from being committed to the culture of cities, he saw them as a barely necessary evil which should be kept as small and tightly controlled as possible, with a few beautiful monuments and very powerful fortifications. Nor was ...”

“... road from Kabul through Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Admittedly, a strong sense of self-preservation led me to end my journey on the circular road at Ghazni, since between there and Kandahar the danger of attack is very much greater. As far as Ghazni, however, not only did the road seem to be safe enough, but as far as I could see the various ...”

“... firms owning over 80 per cent of the market – did most of the damage to itself. The greatest self-inflicted wound came, as such things often do, in the form of a huge opportunity: the compact disc. The new medium was, from the cartel’s point of view, superbly expensive. At first this was because the technology was new and tricky; later, it was simply ...”

“... fits Robert Mugabe all too well. Mugabe and Mbeki think that provided the Government is a self-described ‘national liberation movement’, people ought to be content, but they aren’t. Zimbabweans, black and white, want a liberal democratic society – all the polls show that. Nobody wants to undo national liberation, but they do want desperately ...”

“... strikingly idiosyncratic, tirelessly careful for his people, but also for himself, even a little self-pitying. All the voices of Morebath are his voice. So this is the record of a personal tragedy. It was Trychay who introduced and built up the cult of St Sidwell, ensuring that her gilded image was equipped with silver shoes, Trychay who devoted twenty years ...”

“... to be one.’ Lake agrees that the stage Puritan did much to form perceptions of Puritanism, even self-perceptions. A Northamptonshire preacher delighted in telling his auditory that godly people like themselves were caricatured and castigated by the ungodly as ‘saints on Sundays, devils all the week after, Saint-seeming, Bible-bearing, hypocritical ...”

“... things get rapidly worse, she acquires – like Doctor Glas? – a series habit and a capacity for self-delusion, and he runs away to Copenhagen. Söderberg lived for almost another thirty years, but wrote no more fiction. He wrote about religion, his old bête noire, and history. Unlike Knut Hamsun, he opposed Fascism and Hitler. I like the description – I ...”

“... persistent troubles that Laplace encountered as a result of his somewhat lackadaisical, sometimes self-serving failure to cite the work of contemporaries and immediate predecessors adequately. Hahn has seemingly followed the advice once offered to Hawking: mathematical equations lower book sales. This restriction is severe. Previous books, notably ...”

“... to leave written records of their lives, owe much to a Protestant tradition of agonised self-scrutiny, by no means reliably orthodox or complacent. They read the Bible with ‘piety but also with hunger, to discover God’s order, the architecture of His mind. They found a lot to puzzle about.’ Boston’s problem, as Munro sympathetically ...”

“... millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of unconsciousness much more quickly than the usual upright, and ...”