“... that correspond to the signals received through the senses – and, I would add, that lead to self-consistency in the signal-processing that occurs in the network. The principal evidence here seems to be that the maturing of individuals is accompanied by the regression of the number of synapses. It appears that the genes allow an exuberance in the number ...”

“... for weeks on end. And Benji’s father, it eventually transpires, is a violent drunk. There’s no self-pity in the way Benji tells it. His dominant feeling, when his father is on a bender, is embarrassment. He shuts the windows and hopes the neighbours won’t hear: time to put up the barricades. Benji and Reggie have an older sister. ‘I haven’t talked ...”

“... defences of his work so they could pass them off as their own. And he could appear remarkably self-important: in a lecture on Tocqueville, he noted how impressive it was that in some of his views on the paradoxes of freedom and equality, ‘Tocqueville anticipated me.’ These quirky and revealing writings show that Popper was not as consistent as he ...”

“... Defoe – on whom Carter wrote – and Swift, both of whom excelled at similarly dense and self-reflexive images. According to Clapp, Carter liked to tell the story of her mother’s attempt to stop her from reading novels as a teenager: ‘She told me to remember what had happened to Madame Bovary.’ It is probably, as Clapp suggests, ‘too good to ...”

“... the West, finally joining the EU in 2004. Now, almost a decade on, it is led by the charismatic, self-declared ‘right-wing plebeian’ Viktor Orbán, a man whom critics charge with the ‘Putinisation’ of Hungary. Thanks to his government’s undermining of the rule of law, Hungary risks being the first EU member state to be sanctioned for violating ...”

“... declared shortly after his death, ‘that rectitude of intention was alone a sufficient reason for self-confidence; and therefore feared nothing because he meant well.’ ‘I retain all the ignorance and [remain] under all the prejudice which influenced me,’ was his own proud response to the recommendations of a committee that urged him to end the ...”

“... unadorned Word, while Catholics such as Thomas More (as Seth Lerer shows in Error and the Academic Self) regarded Protestant texts as assemblages of error. For Grafton, correctors stand for ‘something like a new culture’, which pursued regularisation and ‘textual precision’: they were ‘a new social type’, informed by the medieval scriptorium but ...”

“... settlements lining the Pacific coast north of Tokyo, traditions of village or neighbourhood self-government, stretching back to a time when the feudal authorities extracted taxes collectively, are still reflected in local solidarity, particularly among older residents. Neighbourhoods in Japanese cities were once organised similarly. One can find the ...”

“... up their Chinese off-road vehicles, their Mercedovs or mobilovs, their drugs or delicacies. This self-serving attitude is wedded to an utter contempt for their own people, who appear in Komiaga’s narrative as simple, dumb peasants – subservient but also stubborn, inconveniently prone to resent their rulers. We get only indirect indications of this from ...”

“... unwashed ashtray. The phone was still high up on the wall by the front door. I saw my 23-year-old self talking to Italo Calvino. I was wearing navy blue wool trousers and a white shirt. ‘Yes. I think an interview will be all right,’ Calvino was saying. ‘What is the best time for you?’ ‘Around five o’clock?’ ‘Good. We can meet at the Caffè ...”

“... with an independent kingdom of Scotland threatened to undermine England’s sovereign sense of self. Constitutionally, the Anglo-Scottish connection was of a markedly different character from either the Anglo-Welsh or even the Anglo-Irish relationship. Seventeenth-century Englishmen, indebted to a unitary conception of the state, could not find a way to ...”

“... the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day …’ This sort of self-persuasion also released a horde of disgusted Scottish Lib Dems into the SNP park. Talking to some of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I saw that this was often their second migration. Once they had been refugees from Blairism and New Labour. Now they were in ...”

“... described him as ‘a man of strong will, a very hard worker, an exceptional organiser and a self-proclaimed friend of the Soviet Union’, even if he was also ‘cunning, deceitful and ruthlessly repressive’. But the KGB was equally clear that Amin had to go. In their view he wasn’t capable of creating a popular coalition that could resist the ...”

“... Africa, seemed to have returned. This is striking, since la Françafrique has been the object of self-critical pillorying for at least a decade in France and the French were the great detractors of the ‘war on terror’. So, after all the recriminations, are the French still neocolonial? Or have they finally rallied to the idea that waging war on ...”

“... was a buried current running through that telegraphic style, a style that never stopped for self-examination, didn’t bother to search for le mot juste, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy.’ The style was born in the al-Wahat prison camp in Egypt’s western desert, where thousands of political prisoners, Marxist and Islamist, were ...”