“... kept him company, so to speak, in his dotage. Wilhelm, the father, himself the only child of self-obsessed parents, is bitter, spiteful, vain, distracted, sardonic when not scathing, and very handsome. Born of a German mother to an itinerant Neapolitan, he is blond in a world where everyone is dark. Arturo reads that blondness, which he doesn’t ...”

“... effects of different policies – school closures, social distancing, shielding of the elderly and self-isolation of symptomatic individuals – and of combinations of them were simulated by adjusting the average number of contacts. The most effective single strategy, shielding the elderly, still resulted in 220,000 deaths and a need for 120,000 ICU beds, as ...”

“... draw attention to it would be to advertise a country’s dependence on external trade links, and self-sufficiency is the ideal promoted by the politicians of the region. There has long been a close relationship between the control of water resources and the exercise of political or economic power. Ancient Mesopotamian agriculture relied on networks of ...”

“... themselves with the world and how to get on, or with the notion that books might be used for self-advancement. Suits for favours, suits for grants, gifts which implied loyalty, gifts which implicitly sought some form of tangible reciprocation, all of these were part of the texture of life in this period, and no one could survive without mastering at ...”

“... together, making them 28-line poems, and all are given titles, such as ‘True Admiration’, ‘Self-Flattery of Her Beauty’, ‘An Entreaty for Her Acceptance’ – as the latter two indicate, most of the love poems addressed to the young man are now addressed to a woman. To effect this, it was necessary only to change three masculine pronouns in the ...”

“... one Gilbert can’t teach her. If you are to be liked, you have to be like other people, not self-willed; you have to be analogous, to be interchangeable with Fi Hammond or Dido. Catrine won’t have it; to her father she complains: ‘I want to have character I don’t want to be compromised.’ Her interlocutor in the gallery has it wrong: it’s lack ...”

“... of detecting, of following clues to find out the facts, has given rise to all sorts of clever, self-reflexive non-genre writing. Borges was an addict who wrote pastiches in which the detective works from a prison cell; he also played with the idea of reconstructing what was already there: his Pierre Menard begins rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and ...”

“... to her immediately. I’d like to think that she also liked me, that something in my 11-year-old self attracted her apart from my spiritual condition. Maybe so, but I was a lonely, curious child – a sitting duck for conversion – and her campaign began almost immediately. Books were her ammunition. I would devour anything with a plot. I had read Bible ...”

“... examined empirically a key feature of them: the characteristic chaos-theory property of ‘self-similarity’. If successive price changes are independent and follow a Lévy distribution, they should look similar at all levels of magnification: the shape of the distribution of price changes should be identical irrespective of whether one is studying ...”

“... on doing so. It is political vanity to think that the governments of a moment, even at the most self-important of summits, can channel or deploy such mutations of the collective soul. On the way home, I found myself thinking of something said two years ago by Angelo Quattrocchi, an observer (and participant) at the more violent G8 spectacle in Genoa. He ...”

“... sometimes sardonic enquiry into what polio revealed about his own country and his own family. Self-pity, evidently, is an old enemy long ago dealt with, as the book’s final words show. ‘Very occasionally well-meaning people suggested to me as a child that sufferings built character and endurance. Even at the age of seven or eight I suspected I had ...”

“... opinion in order to prioritise elite judgment. When decision-making devolves onto a small group of self-consciously well-informed individuals, it is all too likely that they will lead each other astray, trusting too much in their own judgment and reinforcing each other’s prejudices. Take one recent example: the Iraq war. (I know, I know, we have to move on ...”

“... Ring, and to us when we see the Ring performed. I think Wagner’s model for the Ring was, quite self-consciously, not Lear or anything else Shakespearean, but Aeschylus’ Oresteia sequence, of which the Ring offers a sort of dialectical critique (the suggestion has been made before – see, for example, Michael Ewans’s Wagner and Aeschylus: The ...”

“... and generous style of life and his ineradicable conviction of his own slighted genius. He was self-destructive, intense in his friendships, unlucky in love, but perhaps making more of that than most people feel they should. He could, without blushing, apply to himself the lines of Hopkins: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall ...”

“... The most popular explanation, at least on the left, finds cultural anxieties trumping economic self-interest. The heartland Republicans yearn for a lost social order, for the halcyon days before feminists, homosexuals, affirmative action, pierced noses, secular humanists, multicultural talk and Italian coffee (‘latte liberal’: this season’s favourite ...”