“... could get some young blood who doesn’t know how things were managed, or that the Pennines were self-policing in them days. When we do arrange a get-together we don’t go to the Rat Trappers but to a place in Saddleworth where nobody knows us. We are down one these days; even at seven, Vin had fags in his pocket and his brother used to punch him for ...”

“... own voice, her innocence, her habit of ironing her husband’s Jockey shorts. This is not so much self-absorbed as honest: she was charming, she was lovable, she was the magnet to which most metal flies. As well as a list of houses, she could have written a list of the names she used for herself: Dolores, Maggie, Carlotta, Claudia, Maria, Maya. (How do ...”

“... of restricted data as a jumble of accidents, ideologies, political expediencies, bureaucratic self-interest and unintended consequences. He’s not against the idea of state secrets. He just thinks that the history of American attempts to keep nuclear secrets is what you get when politicians think badly about what scientific knowledge is, about the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to do it in. ‘My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation … I held onto the English language as the rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multilingualism that surrounded me.’ German seems never to have been an option, partly because of ‘the vast and monstrous thing’, as she ...”

“... attempts to answer himself, do you do with your love of American history? Where to put the self that visits graveyards in other cities, on vacation, even putting off the pleasurable sightseeing of wife and children to kneel down and do a grave-rubbing in crayon? He works best in small biodomes, and what better than a cemetery? We can visualise it as a ...”

“... the point of abjection, merely reinforced the problem it was meant to resolve: a crippling lack of self-esteem. Some bitter quarrels ensued. None lasted long enough to destroy their absolute conviction that love for each other had been the great event of both their lives. Ackland died of cancer on 9 November 1969. Warner survived for a further eight years. The ...”

“... 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 ...”