“... and often bitter, though William found happiness in marriage and Caroline aged into pride and self-reliance. Humphry Davy, the other central figure in this book, makes an equally powerful impression. Holmes sketches the state of chemistry at the time of Davy’s entrance to the field, reminding us how very recently Lavoisier had shown water to be not (as ...”

“... after a period of being unable to get his projects approved. But even though he made a public self-criticism of his ‘mistakes’, the film was banned by the bosses at Mosfilm and subsequently destroyed. He was able to redeem himself only by making a 13th-century epic with obvious 20th-century resonance, as Nevsky defends the soil of Rus from invading ...”

“... banks,’ was the tag line for Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Self-importantly influenced by the Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut was originally slated to direct it, but decided to make Fahrenheit 451 instead), the film portrayed the star-crossed criminals as free spirits thwarted and eventually brought down by the law. If you’d ...”

“... in hiding. After Rivas Mira’s departure, Villalobos took charge. The ERP issued an official ‘self-criticism’, which according to Galeas was written by Villalobos. In tortured, dogmatic prose, it blamed the ERP’s troubles on the organisation’s ‘revolutionary immaturity’ and on the ‘bourgeois tendencies sustained’ by Rivas Mira’s ...”

“... overreaching and distracting in the appreciation of the arts. The ‘principle’ of art being ‘self-reflective’, i.e. too much about itself, Ricks writes, ‘like all others, has always been tempted to escalate its claims, to make itself the one thing necessary, as if art’s own nature were the only thing with which art were ever occupied’. True ...”

“... countries’, it seems, because they represent a collective disregard for the country’s better self. What torture, rendition and indefinite detention without trial desecrate, in other words, is not the constitution as ordinarily conceived but the constitution as embodying the moral innocence that Americans supposedly once enjoyed. That an irreverent critic ...”

“... earlier: ‘I am very fond of “Roderick Hudson” – as you know.’ Yet for every gesture of self-abasement, the letters to James also testify repeatedly to her critical acuity and to her pride in her ability to read him so well. The longest of the letters in this volume contains a small informal essay on The Portrait of a Lady, and Woolson’s ...”

“... which arises when what you’re doing is obviously wrong, and the sort which arises because of a self-imposed code of secrecy. Flash Boys has lobbed a very big, very splashy rock into the HFT pond. It’s clear that things aren’t going to go on exactly as they have been; the question is what’s going to change, and whether changing anything will actually ...”

“... has long had an agenda for court sermons, which under his leadership have become almost a self-sufficient literary category. His important book of 1998, Sermons at Court, centred not on the timeless components of Christian teaching, which preachers pass down to one another across the generations, but on the relations of the pulpit to current political ...”

“... you’re lucky, if you get another one and take the right medication you’ll be back to your old self again. But with the brain, the one you were born with either works or it goes wrong and you start sliding away from yourself. Even if a better, cleverer brain – a brainier brain – had been available for transplant I wouldn’t have traded in the addled ...”

“... the Japanese Empire built regional economic blocs in the name of the fashionable ideal of national self-sufficiency, while Britain established a system of exclusionary and preferential trade with its colonies and dominions. In the early years of World War Two, when Allied and Axis planners both began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the ...”

“... that comes across like this is Tony Blair’s, which was also so disconnected, erratic and self-referential that it had the unmistakeable ring of authenticity. Blair jumped from subject to subject in such a peculiar way that it had to be the way his mind really worked. Interestingly, both books have sold far better than anyone expected, especially ...”

“... memory you’ll find, fumbling,/A glove to the elbow that unlocks/A Petersburg night’). She is self-dramatising in 1960’s Liebeslieder Walzer (the Violette Verdy role) and dreaming her destiny in 1977’s Vienna Waltzes (the ‘Rosenkavalier’ movement). Kendall shows us that this girl was born in Valse Triste – the haunted solo that Ivanova worked on ...”

“... Lang,’ so I gave up and called him Lang with a twang like everyone else for the simpler if less self-righteous life. So chemo’s over. A week after the last infusion, I was scanned from head to abdomen to see what, if anything, had happened. Just once the technician said ‘brain’ instead of ‘head’ and my careful poise unravelled, though not so far ...”

“... that convergence might be contrary to the trust deed. Soon afterwards I was required to provide a self-evaluation document about the institute for Ivor Crewe, who was about to carry out a major review of the funding of SAS for Hefce. ‘How far the implementation of the convergence policy is compatible with undertakings made by the university to the Warburg ...”