“... 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 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 ...”

“... training programme, which aimed to dissolve the false persona and release the initiate’s true self. In the 1940s, Carl Jung co-opted spiritual alchemy as a metaphor for ‘individuation’: the repressed, mercurial unconscious would combine with the dominant, sulphuric consciousness to produce a unified self.It’s ...”

“... mountains by Hungarian motorcycle fiends. Fiume, the Whitehead Torpedo Factory: origin of the self-propelled torpedoes that armed the US navy. Pynchon shows the way ripples from the political earthquake in Berlin are felt in the bowling alleys of Milwaukee, and the music sung in a Chicago cocktail lounge is received and remodulated in a nightclub on the ...”

“... consulted various people in an attempt to understand his experiences, he performs – slightly self-consciously – a cleansing ceremony with his ex-wife, wafting burning sage around the house. With his new girlfriend he also gives the house a lick of paint and replaces window frames and floorboards. This seems to stop the slugs and rats getting in. And it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of them well educated and middle class, was attracting large audiences by emphasising aspiration, self-betterment and respectability. In what seems to have been a wildly misguided effort to be taken seriously again, Wedderburn published a pamphlet arguing that permitting enslaved labourers to purchase their own freedom over time was preferable to immediate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that still prevailed in the 1970s. In the decades since then, Reid asserts, the ‘apparently self-evident … merits of Keynesianism and deficit financing have been displaced’. But even this restates what Marquand himself wrote in 2004 in a re-evaluation of MacDonald’s life, admitting that his earlier criticisms had been moulded by the ‘equally ...”

“... The church clock is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my ...”

“... a love story. The real romance is not the one between Edwards and the extremely peculiar Hunter, a self-described ‘truth seeker’ and ‘old soul’ who needs to call her psychic guru back in California before she can decide whether to have Russian dressing with her Reuben sandwich. The love is between Young and Edwards, even though from the start it is ...”

“... Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to lead a church without a congregation. His parting gesture was to preside over a black mass. He ...”

“... were in their dying phases and both Armenians and Azerbaijanis discovered the idea of national self-determination’. Since then, dubious historical narratives and the jargon of 19th-century nationalism have been deployed to reinforce a mutual antipathy.Nagorno-Karabakh​ – Nagorny, Russian for ‘mountainous’; Kara-Bakh, Turkish for ‘black ...”

“... but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ...”

“... one day repeat such an experiment with another race.’ In an extraordinary gesture of radical self-abnegation – not the type of gesture for which he is best known – Freud was willing to sacrifice humanity, as we might say these days, to save the planet. Later, in the 1930s, with the next war on the horizon, he again speculated that the human race was ...”