“... on the concept of the ‘spy’ in contemporary life – if a spy is a person who creates a false self in order to achieve material comfort. Still, I would have preferred a ...”

“... dose of it as therapy for what is either hypocritical or brutally cynical, if not simply blind and self-absorbed, in American thinking about the great outside world beyond those apparently dismally protected US borders.At which point, the philosophical problem of relativism rears its ugly head and another round of polemics, in a somewhat different spirit and ...”

“... to have made her too doctrinaire to tolerate Weil’s decision to remain outside the Church. Self-righteous and condescending, she scolds Weil’s Catholic advisers for not sticking to the ‘most ancient, the most classical’ version of Catholicism and for failing to give Weil the elementary advice which, she insists, would have made her a ...”

“... centuries later. But then, for us, Bonfire Night was all about feeling not thinking, an atavism of self-enchantment, a ripple in time from our ancestors outfacing the cold, dark harbingers of winter with heat and light. And what better way to make light than with fireworks? Even the lid of the box was gaudily thrilling, like a fairground or circus. And beneath ...”

“... seeds; yellow or green seed colour; purple or white flowers. Taking great care to keep his self-fertilising stock as pure as possible, so he could be confident that, for example, the green-seeded peas reliably produced only green seeds and yellow-seeded ones only yellow, he proceeded to hybridise them and keep track of their traits over ...”

“... to view each other with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection.’ In her essay ‘Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger’, from 1983, she expanded this argument:From [birth] we have been steeped in hatred – for our colour, for our sex, for our effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to ...”

“... used not for spectacle but camouflage. Resistance to the Roman state is also clear: we hear about self-identified Romans dressed by pirates in full official regalia before being invited to climb a ladder down into the sea. In return, pirates were subject to especially gruesome state punishments, chained up alive or displayed as corpses on the coast in ‘a ...”

“... If I one day win the Nobel, it could not confer a greater distinction.Miette was back to her usual self a week later, but I had developed a low-grade fever. My head ached, my neck, my back. My eyes ached in their orbits and streamed tears whenever I tried to read or watch television. My mouth tasted like a foreign penny. ‘You reek,’ I mentioned to Jason ...”

“... years ago the basic information-encoding chemical molecules of life formed, and somehow came to be self-replicating. DNA, or more likely RNA, entered a life-sustaining loop of reproducing itself, and then, through random iteration, began to make the proteins that do its bidding. Now it’s established that proteins can themselves transmit information, why ...”

“... and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today. It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and ...”

“... left branch bundle of his heart – and still describing himself to the doctors and nurses as a self-taught nutritionist. I knew he would try out the tea for a week and then decide it was oestrogenic.At my age you need all the testosterone you can get, he said. Does he know there is a time when he won’t have ANY testosterone? Jason asked on the drive ...”

“... through lax immigration laws to get all they can out of America and bring nothing but filth and self-interest’. The letter is dated 26 June 1952 and written on notepaper from the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City – at that time a prestigious address, but more recently used to house asylum seekers. It was occasioned by Truman’s decision to veto ...”

“... One motivation was to persuade bankers that a Labour government would be sensible, in the City’s self-interested terms, which essentially meant it wouldn’t impose new regulations on the banks’ ever riskier activities. Brown thought the financial sector was crucial to economic growth, and to the extra tax revenue New Labour would need to reduce poverty ...”

“... three million files, released on 30 January, revealed a series of emails from Mandelson seeking self-advancement through Epstein’s devices, grubbing for cash to pay for his partner to take a course in osteopathy, and passing confidential government material to Epstein and his banker associates. This second wave of documents, which made clear that his ...”

“... the writer Otto Perl, prompted by the plight of men wounded in the First World War, founded the Self-Help League of the Physically Handicapped (Selbsthilfebund der Körperbehinderten). Perl, who suffered from a stiffness of the limbs bordering on paralysis, was confined to a series of institutions but still managed in 1926 to publish a history of disabled ...”