“... night – takes its shape and tone from standard accounts of the A6 murder, the first case in any self-respecting compilation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Crime, Oliver Cyriax comments that ‘thirty years ago, it seemed inconceivable that a Briton might hang for a crime he was tied to by almost no evidence.’ Now we have no such misconceptions. Railways ...”

“... Irrationally but unmanageably outraged. This is very important to me, I replied to my reasoning self, but I was unable to explain why.The Arctic would have been easier, but I had no desire to head North. I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see, and I wanted it in the one place in the world which was uninhabited. I wanted my white bedroom extended ...”

“... a security firm, with a website offering the chance to go on the ‘ultimate jihad challenge’, a self-defence training course in America. The offer was only ever taken up by one person, a security guard from Sainsbury’s. Sulayman attracted the attention of Special Branch and MI5, who made several attempts to recruit him as an agent. After 11 September the ...”

“... give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do? Of course he helps her. What Victorian man of feeling wouldn’t? But there’s something odd here, not apparent on a first reading, about ...”

“... side bellows: ‘Facciamo i nostri morti’ (‘Let’s kill too’). Killing is always a powerful self-affirmation, however inoffensive the victim. These scenes are persuasive vehicles for Saviano’s message, and throughout the film the ugliness and poverty of people’s homes, the clashing colours of their cheap clothes, the squalor of the public ...”

“... different this time is that no one expects new technologies to be democratic or to encourage ‘self-reliance and non-violence’, as AT was supposed to. Perhaps that’s just as well. The rebels of the East Village eventually gave up on their windmill because it required too much maintenance. Geodesic domes, too, failed to live up to their promise. The ...”

“... of 1399 wrought in Henry a ‘deep change of character’; or was he merely revealing his true self? And how did the experience colour his outlook and actions as king? Henry’s story cannot be told without addressing these questions. Mortimer’s account of Henry’s upbringing and early career is full and perceptive. His father ensured that he knew the ...”

“... only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace’. Sam may be ridiculously self-obsessed but we tuck him in and turn off the light. Keith’s summer job means he ends up meeting his intellectual hero, Morris Binkel. Keith wants Binkel to say he sees something in him. What he does say is: ‘Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a ...”

“... Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more subtle. The architects he singled out, Norman Shaw and Baillie Scott, Mackintosh and the very young Lutyens among them, are ...”

“... and could be adopted by those who take much more traditional approaches to questions of the self and the mind. In fact, Sellars’s own endorsement of mind-body identity owes little to his inferentialism; its motivation lies rather in a quite orthodox conception of the authority of science, as well as a refusal to deny the reality of the mental. He may ...”

“... as Konstantin on Broadway long ago, meaning that he’s channelling his own best, happiest self as well as the role – touching, which is the real twist of the knife. To add that pathos to the black, black joke is the touch of genius, because, unlike, say, the nice family who miraculously show up at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Treplevianly bleak ...”

“... of Important Energies’, who carries a lifetime’s resentment of his charismatic, self-centred father, Roger. Burt spent his childhood with a crush on his young stepmother, Lucy, and cherished a vague belief that, around his 16th birthday, he would somehow inherit her, perhaps along with his father’s Mustang fastback. But Roger has never ...”

“... This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the ...”

“... who for the most part considered themselves individualists and independents. This delusion of self-sufficiency, along with the fantasy that enough water could be found to supply the region, launched the eco-tragedy now unfolding. Towards the end of his book, Powell points out that the US Bureau of Reclamation has decided not to take climate change into ...”

“... large extent, the story of Eilis’s impressions, her reflections, her winning through to a mature self-consciousness. Tóibín’s aim is not to document 1950s Irish-American Brooklyn through Eilis’s eyes – though coincidentally he does do this. Rather, and far more interestingly, his aim is to render the inner world of Eilis Lacey. The inner world of ...”