“... describes the plague with remarkable scientific detachment, though not without great pathos, his self-observed recovery and subsequent immunity from this unique world-historical disease perhaps setting him off on that journey adrift from his locality, a stranger among his own people, wandering untouchable, a ghost, watching without participating any longer ...”

“... nuclear holocaust, or some other diversion. Besides, I had a sentimental yearning for the days of self-improvement: they were founded, these reading clubs, by master drapers and their shop-girl wives; by poetasting engineers, and uxorious physicians with long winter evenings to pass. Who keeps them going these days? I was leading at the time an itinerant ...”

“... is that of individuals.’ Seeking to represent them as types of individual was therefore self-defeating: the best you got was a crude caricature of social diversity on the one hand, and politically isolated individuals on the other. The only apparent alternatives, however, were equally unpalatable. To represent France as 25 or 26 million separate ...”

“... another group, Stop HS2, has had to launch an appeal to pay its co-ordinator, Joe Rukin, who is self-employed; in December he was paid just £380, which Rukin said had forced him to ‘reconsider his position’. Despite this group’s lack of funds, supporters of HS2 have tended to dismiss the ‘antis’ as well-heeled Buckinghamshire residents, more ...”

“... he doesn’t believe the regime will be undermined by sanctions in the short term, since Syria is self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs. When the crisis began last year, the country had foreign exchange reserves of $17 billion and a national debt of only 10 per cent of GDP, a ratio European countries would envy. The souvenir and antique shops of Damascus’s ...”

“... taxes are those who work for the government,’ said the mayor. ‘The money can’t be hidden. Self-employed people, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, civil engineers, builders, plumbers – no one pays taxes. From the shipowners all the way down.’ In using tax evasion to make his case against the kharatsi, Filippou inadvertently explains why the government ...”

“... of the afterlife will then be a history of our conceptions of God, as well as a history of our self-conceptions, of our utopias and terrors, and this is what John Casey provides. Casey is in many ways an ideal guide. He is bracingly conservative about the writing of cultural history, meaning that he likes texts, and chronology, and evidence. He has taught ...”

“... he looks at the wounded in battle, the blood in the water: ‘All faces of the same man, one big self.’ Dying is one half of war: the other half is killing. Many of the men of C Company die in the extended fight to capture a hill from the enemy, but those who reach the top proceed to kill, and kill rampantly, horribly. It is then, during the massacre of ...”

“... that I sometimes thought I might have a heart attack from the anger that shot up from its coiled self in Shoot-Up Hill, as it sprang powerful and metallic but always kept inside. Not really dangerous, honestly, an anger that afflicted only me. Another door. This time the right sort. Me on the outside, Doris inside. I knock, although she knows I’m there ...”

“... like a cave, but a place of artifice, of skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel the self-assurance. The walls are of red sandstone, dressed into long rectangles, with a tall sentry-like buttress in each corner to support the corbelled roof. The passage to the outside world is at the base of one wall. Set waist-high into the other three are ...”

“... into danger is to assert that asylum seekers in general are lying. As a political strategy this is self-defeating, because, to be effective, it relies on the impossibility of satisfying the public’s appetite for crackdowns: the more the government tells people that the great majority of those seeking asylum do not need it, the more asylum seekers it will be ...”

“... apparently felt they had more urgent problems to address. The only printed response came from a self-styled ‘artist and big game-shot’, who claimed that his experiences of stalking deer in Scotland had shown him the importance of ‘breaking up the outline’ rather than just trying to make uniforms tone in with the background. This fellow vouched that ...”

“... Bunyan uses a corpse as a similar symbol: The body ariseth, as to the nature of it, the self-same nature; but as to the manner of it; how far transcendent is it! There is a poor, dry, wrinkled kernel cast into the ground, and there it lieth, and swelleth, breaketh, and, one would think, perisheth; but behold, it receiveth life, it chitteth, it ...”

“... day. It isn’t only the overtly gorgeous passages that shine. Here’s a sentence, anything but self-advertising, from late in the new novel: ‘There was the noise, like a rough breath, of the drawer pulled open for socks and pants, the surprised little squeak of the wardrobe and the flick of hangers as he chose a shirt.’ A man in bed, lazing after sex ...”

“... by ‘blood-and-thunderists’ at home. He was also frustrated that the censor thwarted his self-representation in his letters as a chivalric knight, a youth forged by war into an honourable man. ‘Amongst other things that modern warfare has done away with is the long and accurate chronicle which used to find its way to the anxious household, giving ...”