“... the morbid pathology of William Lyttle, the scratching and scraping Mole Man of Hackney.† This self-funding tunneller was condemned, without planning permission and private equity, to eviction, seizure of property, theoretical bills, and a despairing death. On her way to Tregunter Road in Chelsea, Knowles discovers that professional excavators prefer to ...”

“... and improved on Kilby’s version because there were no free-standing wires: the chip was entirely self-contained. ‘The transistors were built into a single block of material. Soon, the “integrated circuits” that Kilby and Noyce had developed would become known as “semiconductors” or, more simply, “chips”.’ The people at Fairchild immediately ...”

“... of the new Russian liberalism will be the one its predecessor failed – real respect for national self-determination. The second will, of course, be the nature of the political system to emerge inside Russia itself. The sudden, peaceful springing into the air of Communist rule has been an extraordinary psychological liberation for its people. The freedoms now ...”

“... an obscure seaman. The East India Company gave him a chance to satisfy his zeal for intellectual self-improvement as well as his social ambitions. He would boast that he had never watched a horse race or fixed a gun in his life. As Governor of Java (briefly captured from the Dutch), at Bencoolen, the EIC’s malarial and unprofitable base in ...”

“... seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,’ she wrote; or ‘I have a vague theory that one learns most – I have learned most – from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then. I mean about life, the world, and ...”

“... its obvious difficulties. No one can object to the attack on confusion, conflict, obscurity, and self-deceit in our everyday beliefs; these defects in our views of ourselves and the world exist in profusion, and if some philosophers can with skill or luck do something about reducing them, those philosophers deserve our respect and support. But it would be ...”

“... f + s + i → T, where A is access, m is money, r is resentment, b is blackmailability (sic), s is self-satisfaction, i is ideology, and T is Treason. Ha, thought I’d forgotten f? No, it’s just that f is the pièce de résistance: it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... If Armstrong really is Trump then he’s likely to remain trapped in his bubble of bluster and self-delusion until the money runs out. However, the person he increasingly reminds me of is Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to Alastair Campbell. For Tucker the only line of defence ...”

“... in and through language, you have to bid farewell to the idea of a stable, unified self. That notion is another of those reassuring fictions – like god, Spinoza’s ‘substance’, Hegel’s Geist, Heidegger’s ‘being’, Lévi-Strauss’s structures – we have devised in order to escape différance and find some anchor, some ‘meaning ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... postwar government had the conviction or courage to make real such a moment, and Akihito’s self-defined role as protector of the constitution made it impossible, by definition, for him to step outside it unaccompanied. It is one of Japan’s greatest failures in 75 years of postwar success that it remains unreconciled with the countries in the world ...”

“... 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 ...”