“... as it were through the spine or the outside of a book to what it contains, remembering the past self that read the book (or that bought the book with the intention of reading it one day) and re-experiencing the feeling of reading it for the first time. There’s a latent knowledge or an association of memories that gets released by that or by the book’s ...”

“... want with their long-term partners is no less corrosive, no less demeaning to their sense of self, than ‘rape’ as we usually talk about it (correct or not, this is a very different, and serious, point). It is also true that she suggested, in response to a question from the audience, that two hundred hours of community service might be an appropriate ...”

“... Guiana to visit a spider museum; and round again to Putin. On stage, she was less fierce and self-possessed than the figure I remembered at an FN open-air rally in Paris in 2012. She wasn’t helped by the party’s stage managers, whose son-et-lumière seemed to diminish their leader: the overused music – Ravel’s Bolero – the flashing lights, the ...”

“... alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of the subjective life’. Hegel’s followers, epigones and incomprehenders (his prose does make it easy to be one of those) turned lyric into the mode in which poets represented the operations of consciousness and creativity. Spirit strutted its ...”

“... climbers. Alternately puffed up and slapped down, his temperament developed into a mixture of self-doubt and ambivalence interlaced with short-lived bursts of enthusiasm and fits of petulance. Not naturally empathetic or a particularly good judge of character, he was not saved by friendships or by having any single outstanding ability. At Cambridge, where ...”

“... For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that comprises the northern part of Somalia – thousands of sheep and goats lay strewn in varying states of decay. The contents of their stomachs, it was easy to see, were mainly colourful shreds of plastic ingested in the ...”

“... on the coast at Lyme Regis were instrumental in the development of palaeontology. Anning’s self-taught expertise, her subtle interpretation of fossils, and her many notable discoveries (including the ichthyosaur) made her one of the first authorities in the nascent discipline. But as a woman she couldn’t join the Geological Society of London and De ...”

“... to biographers, but it’s difficult not to read one of her earliest poems, ‘Lament’, as a self-epitaph in the tradition of Villon, Corbière and her fictional contemporary Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: I am an exiled king without his crown, A dying poet with a tattered mask, A starving beggar who may nothing ask, And a religion that has been cast ...”

“... of him, Phillips’s friends and associates are less careful, describing him as a bombastic, self-congratulatory boor and ‘full of shit’ when he’d ‘had a few’, which was often. The book is long, and the last third of it, like Phillips’s life, is much less interesting than the rest. Phillips enjoyed himself in later life, driving around ...”

“... Kotkin has no real answer. He concedes that Stalin may well have wanted to get rid of ‘evasive, self-serving’ bureaucrats and replace tired, ill-educated Old Bolsheviks with young promotees with better education, but, as Kotkin rightly points out, ‘Stalin faced no imperative to murder them. He could sack or transfer any local satrap at will.’ He does ...”

“... al-Omar oilfield, the largest in the country. Turkey was never going to accept any form of Kurdish self-determination in Syria, though the Kurds argue that they are only asking for a federal system in which they have a high degree of autonomy – not independence. Turkey has long wanted to intervene militarily in Syria, but so long as the US and Russia opposed ...”

“... economy. As soon as the medieval settlement was snuffed out by free-market capitalism, the ‘self-protection of society set in’, producing Victorian and Edwardian social legislation such as the Factory Acts. This conjuncture created room for a political and industrial working class to spring into being. Polanyi replaced Tawney’s pessimistic dichotomy ...”

“... lived for weeks on the Eucharist alone. Avoiding both conspicuous consumption and conspicuous self-denial, physicians recommended a golden mean. They understood the body in terms of balance. In a model dating back to Hippocrates, different proportions of four basic qualities (hot, cold, moist and dry) established four complexions or temperaments: sanguine ...”

“... the entire book. Much of the energy in d’Eramo’s story comes from the tension between her self-destructive impulses and her forceful will to live. But it’s intimately bound up with another impulse: ‘I was crushed by a sorrow and shame that paralysed my resolve. I had to shed my social class.’ (Her own earnestness on this score occasionally leads ...”

“... you hardly saw the man who cleaned it. Man in a Red Turban, the panel that must be Van Eyck’s self-portrait, stayed in London (along with the Arnolfini Portrait). The man who wrote the motto on its frame, ‘Als Ich Can’ – or ‘Here’s what I [‘Eyck’] can do’ – springs to life briefly in the duchy’s account books two years after the ...”