“... on the conversation to make a joke or say something smart. Then I go home covered with a layer of self-disgust as if I’d been rolling in donkey shit, and for a day or two afterwards, I stay in bed with the covers over my head in shame. In public and prescribed ritual, I have no easy get-out, but I can’t just get on with it. The only way I can manage ...”

“... abandoning the technical study of many works that shaped everything from the contemplation of the self – think of Augustine and Petrarch – to the contemplation of nature: in addition to Newton and Halley, think of Copernicus and Vesalius, William Gilbert and Gabriel Harvey, Bacon and Descartes. It’s hard to imagine the surgeons of the world deciding ...”

“... The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a caricature as anything in the press coverage of the Lucan affair.From this historical distance it is not only broad ...”

“... the villagers’ way of making more of it than mere survival, dents her compassion for her younger self. ‘Nervous troubles,’ she writes, ‘had yet to be invented.’ Thompson was born in 1876, the eldest child of Albert Timms, originally of Buckingham. In his youth he’d trained as a stone carver and taken part in the restoration of Bath Abbey, but his ...”

“... But Lovelock’s hypothesis also goes beyond this to claim that Gaia seeks, through a mechanism of self-regulation of the sort exhibited by organisms, to maintain factors like temperature and oxygen in states that are favourable to itself, the living Earth. The resulting conditions need not be favourable to us – we are just one part of it. The strongest ...”

“... polishing, and then presenting the results in alphabetical order. This may qualify as a piece of self-disciplined formal choosing (ascèse is the word used), but it isn’t a constraint in the Oulipo sense, lacking (as does Sphinx) the necessary element of arbitrariness. It’s true that Oulipo is supportive rather than prescriptive, but if it amounts to a ...”

“... me to the address to do a drug deal and I had a gun and no intention of killing, the gun was for self-protection. I didn’t have the intention so how could he have the foresight?’ Powell has moved back to the badlands where he grew up and is a part-time youth worker and motivational speaker. ‘You have to get to kids like me by the time they’re eight ...”

“... A Grief Observed, published pseudonymously, tracked the stages of his bereavement, from self-pity, through anger (God must be a ‘Cosmic Sadist’) to Christian solace and hope. Its fragmentary form is suggestive of spontaneity, but the didactic end – as always with Lewis – is never in doubt. For all their searching conversations, Lewis and ...”

“... than the admissibility of evidence, are quite prepared to trick employees into self-incrimination or to misrepresent the true position in order to get a confession. But even though I never deliberately deceive or misrepresent, there is still a considerable gap between my powers as an interviewer and the protections afforded an ...”

“... act with righteous violence, sometimes not. Often they are stymied by the peevishness and self-interest of police bureaucracy. They live in the real world, the fallen world: the attractions of crime are far more potent than they are. But how often does that version of police work play in the heads of actual policemen? In most popular culture, the ...”

“... the population are of only incidental concern to its leaders. This is a government which, in its self-imposed isolation, has effectively sanctioned itself. If the collapse of the North Korean economy after the Cold War and the Arduous March were not enough to prompt political change, or galvanise North Koreans to rise up, then no fudged punishment imposed ...”

“... to locate’. Enter Laing and Clancy’s radical attempt to dismantle and heal his manic tormented self. (Clancy dubbed Laing ‘Willie Last’ in his satirical novel Zone of the Interior, published in 1976. Laing threatened libel action, so the novel was published here after Laing’s death.) At the time they met in his Wimpole Street office, Laing was in his ...”

“... The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into unemployment, the world was desperate for fiscal stimulus, and there were calls on all sides for greater controls on banking ...”

“... good book about the ball-tampering story and the cricket culture behind it. So Australia are the self-appointed experts on the game’s ethos, while repeatedly violating it and the actual rules. Those rules talk about ‘the spirit of cricket’, thus making cricket the only game in which respecting the implicit ethos is explicitly part of the rules. All ...”

“... Indian affairs: ‘if the Bill passes, I am no more a king,’ he said with his usual histrionic self-pity (a characteristic failing of princes, then and now). It also evinces the electrifying effect of the king’s disapproval on those who hoped for further favours – a step up in the peerage or a juicy sinecure. Merely by letting it be known that ‘I ...”