“... the World!’Ghost hunting was a money-spinner between the wars, especially for the popular press. Self-styled investigators, often journalists, went on assignments to haunted houses, toting microphones and cameras, and other paraphernalia. Like other sensational stunts paid for by the papers, the stories were aimed largely at the rapidly expanding readership ...”

“... This was a reference to the Canadian TV show Slings & Arrows, where a white charlatan with the self-bestowed name Sanjay convinces the director of a Shakespeare festival that if he courts a younger generation with an incredibly offensive, nihilistic ad campaign – billboards reading F*CK YOU, showing current elderly patrons of the festival on life support ...”

“... towards knowledge is all the more uncertain when the knowledge pursued is knowledge of the self. But the little tricks our minds play on us have proved to be fine doors into the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured patterns when we press on our closed eyes? Why do amputees still feel ...”

“... England especially, had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with loyalty: the self-sacrificing loyalty expected by a man from a true woman. Flora is supposed to have said that she would have tried to rescue anybody she found in such distress, not just a rebel prince. It was a remark that thrilled her sympathisers, Jacobites or ...”

“... Her ferociously high standards have led her to withhold from Ludo the identity of his father, a self-important philistine she once slept with out of politeness and never set eyes on again. She decides that repeated viewings of her favourite film, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, will provide him with appropriate ‘role models’, and a strong ...”

“... Marxist’. I am not sure I understand what that label means. One of the last major figures to self-identify that way was Eduard Bernstein, who pioneered democratic socialism in the German parliamentary system. But Ypi seems to mean something more general: a lingering suspicion that the left will forget about universal morality in its headlong pursuit of ...”

“... had urged me to tone down the offending sketch, particularly the erection/reaction gag but (rather self-righteously) I refused. There wasn’t much laughter that night in the rest of the show, which normally went by in gales of hilarity, but with the audience only concerned with what the Royal Party was thinking, much of it passed in awkward silence.It’s ...”

“... in the invasion and destruction of East Timor and its opposition to West Papuan demands for self-determination. The Australian contingent in the Five Eyes put considerable resources into intelligence operations in East Timor in the early 2000s, and successive governments have refused to negotiate a maritime boundary there, wanting to continue to reap ...”

“... presumably, be already sufficiently disconcerted to learn of the means chosen by Queen Anna to self-administer an abortion in 1603 without needing to translate ‘scho had gottin sum balme watter, whilk haistnit hir abort’. Similarly, the young Elizabeth’s description of her wigs as ‘pykit vyr, coverit vith heir, to ver on my head’ jars with ...”

“... a house, ‘Gallows make the sign of the cross with his forefingers and kiss it. “Tomorrow self please God I going to look for a work, whatever it is, if is not executiving I won’t mind directing a bank or something. I will give up the search for that fiver that I lost one day and concentrate on reality.”’They plan to raise money by organising a ...”

“... for who will verify that? Fourth, and most embarrassing, the principle of verifiability is self-refuting: for either it is itself empirically verifiable, or it is ‘merely formal’ (whatever that may mean), or it is meaningless. Since it cannot claim to belong to either of the first two categories, it seems condemned to belong to the third, in which ...”

“... extent brought on themselves. To use Hynes’s words, ‘part of the argument was that English self-indulgence and English tolerance of disruptive movements, like Irish nationalism and Suffragism, had encouraged the Germans to think that England would not, and could not, fight.’ Then, as knowledge of the actualities of trench-warfare began to enter the ...”

“... clothes seem to be made for adults) is not a random choice. Reading Price’s extracts from the self-dramatising journal kept by Michael Leiris in the Thirties in which he describes how he robbed masks and fetishes in Africa, it is hard not to dream about returning them (and Leiris, bound hand and foot) to the tribes in question. Reading her detailed ...”

“... But then Albert died. Like many a Victorian woman, the Queen wanted to withdraw into the self-enclosed seclusion of private grief and gloom. And for over a decade, that is precisely what she tried to do. But although she was now a widow, she was also still the Queen, and during the 1860s and early 1870s she found it exceptionally difficult to ...”

“... to minister only to pathos and exasperation, yet at the time it was meant (with what clutching at self-deception, who can know?) to comfort. 1939? Early days? Evil days, and evil tongues, and more than tongues.The Age of Wonders has two endings, because – unusually for Appelfeld – the book is phased as two Books. Of all the novels it is the one which has ...”