“... who spoke German. He had studied medicine in Germany after escaping from the East; she was a self-consciously romantic woman who spoke a hyperbolic, soulful, Russian-accented version of my mother tongue. During the summers there were also my uncles and aunts, who came to visit our cottage in Virginia; there were my mother’s buddies from Istanbul, and ...”

“... the belief (common among Israel’s right wing) that Arabs know only headman politics: a matter of self-seeking leaderships manipulating inchoate masses innately prone to ‘respect power’. In this view, changing a leadership would change mass behaviour and, in the present instance, put an end to violent responses to Israeli occupation. That an Arab ...”

“... servants have continued to fill its senior ranks. After Lewis’s dismissal, it seemed that no self-respecting outsider would take on the job of Director General – although ministers denied that any approach had been made, Ramsbotham records turning down an unsolicited invitation to take the post before he became Chief Inspector. Those who come up ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 Left could lose. This realisation dawned on the Left too, and it began to speak a language of self-criticism. Mamata, in the meantime, was about to forge an alliance with the Congress – the party that had once shown her the door – for the 2011 assembly elections, as, by some distance, the dominant partner. Once derided by the Left and even beaten up ...”

“... bedside, in Beirut’s Zahla Hospital, for nearly a month and, to his family, he seemed his old self. He continued to pray and to read the Koran, but to the highly secular Jarrahs that didn’t matter. Their son had returned. ‘He was very shaken by his father’s near-death experience,’ Sengün would later tell German investigators. ‘He was so much ...”

“... War. But these facts were never mentioned in DPRK propaganda. ‘Juche’, an aggressive form of self-reliance, was the word coined to designate this xenophobia. When I asked the interpreter on my first trip whether he had read any Marx or Engels or Lenin, he looked puzzled. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everything is interpreted by Comrade Kim Il-sung.’ He ...”

“... 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 ...”