“... of Pearl, is otherwise unattested in Middle English, and that the scribe’s handwriting looks self-consciously archaic by the standards of the late 14th century. But no amount of knowledge about medieval literary culture can make the Pearl Manuscript tell us what it means. Everyone has to speculate at some point. There is no textual evidence that the ...”

“... deferred to the military, as it often did, and accepted Lavigne’s claim that he had fired in self-defence.What unfurls is an astonishing narrative about the wages of the US’s covert wars abroad in the last quarter-century. Leshikar and Lavigne are not the only special forces operators whose stories of drug use and narcotic-related deaths are ...”

“... as part of a management plan. Once reintroduced, though, they might show signs of being a bit self-willed: white-tailed eagles have an eight-foot wingspan. Recently, one took a flight round the Asda car park in Dunfermline. People were so alarmed they called the police.If there’s a breath of wild at Asda, in the furthest flung places you might find ...”

“... customs and shared ancestry. The difficulty can’t be evaded simply by accepting a group’s self-identification, which often incorporates similar analogies to natural kinds. Perhaps this is why Qureshi, who is well aware of the abuses of race terminology, vacillates between describing the humans facing extinction as ‘nations’, ‘native ...”

“... moved effortlessly between genres, and were masters of irony and allusion. They were also adept at self-fashioning, to the point of complete deception. High-minded, sorrowful and penetrating indictments of court corruption and the evils of politics were written by men who were prospering in political life or desperately seeking political ...”

“... and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation. He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government, signing eight anti-abortion bills in his four years as governor of Indiana, and going after ...”

“... judge, brokerage merely shifted unions from love and affection to the ‘still honest domain of self-interested transactions’.But this emerging legal consensus didn’t hold. The following year, a case involving one of Foy’s competitors, André-Constant Foubert, went before France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation, which ruled that matchmakers ...”

“... such weighty consequences.’ Increased population density led to the revival of trade and urban self-government; ‘seigneurial anarchy’, Bloch argued, was slowly being eclipsed by the modernising forces of the centralising state and the bourgeois freedom it allowed. Economic revival in France in particular took the form of internal, intensive ...”

“... despite the evidence of her medical file, how alert and full of good humour and lacking in self-pity. She had bruising from the steroid-induced thinness of her skin and, as she told me, she couldn’t see my face, a few feet away. She had her legs up on the sofa (on top of everything else, she has a collapsing spine) and when she moved it was with the ...”

“... Nothing was said in the advert about acting ability or Mrs Donaldson would not have applied; self-confidence wasn’t mentioned either, which would have been another deterrent as Mrs Donaldson had always thought of herself as shy. It was a point not lost on Gwen to whom she was unwise enough to mention her application. ‘For a start you don’t like ...”

“... was said to ‘revel in the status his sentence gives him’. A senior psychologist found him ‘self-justifying, superficial and self-centred’; the ‘only constructive suggestion’ he could make was that McCluskie be allowed to go on a painting and decorating course. The officer who concluded, ‘A very poor prospect ...”

“... on about 15 acres of land. He kept sheep, pigs and cattle and tended a two-acre orchard. He was self-sufficient. He got the family out without mishap. On their arrival in Belgrade, they registered as refugees and were eventually transferred to Kosovo. There were other options – they were even asked if they wanted to settle outside the former Yugoslavia ...”

“... supportive, Yiddish and English-speaking parents, growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early ...”

“... Wall Street lawyers for universal peace in the same years, in a ne plus ultra of empty American self-satisfaction.But Ghervas’s account of the League is disabling in her own terms. She fails to register how Eurocentric her picture becomes as a result of her decision to ignore Latin American opposition to the imperial presumption of the design of the ...”

“... marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more heartache, all of it against a revolving backdrop of political turmoil and cultural ...”