“... with the regular and not excessive marching speed of the universe explain his buying one of those self-winders: he was a busy man and couldn’t afford the soft unclear evaporation of minutes, a day or two a year. The busy man winds his watch on as he drives, writes a prescription, taps a sweating back. But later, sitting for hours rehearsing from his ...”

“... False Spring A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away. * All night, the industry of erasure, effacement, our one mouth working itself dry. * But even a god can’t stop the light that finds us, annealed, fruitless, two strangers broken on the field of day ...”

“... milky voice Of course I’ll wake you up when he comes; and then his eyelids close, and in his self-created darkness he is following a big car on a motorway at night, it turns into the driveway to the house, and presently the driver gets out: it is only a bear in the moonlight, walking on the lavender ...”

“... interviewees, a vivid picture emerges of the parsonage and its inhabitants: the literary (self-described) eccentric, Patrick, working on his sermons, agitating for local causes and eating his meals alone. Aunt Branwell – Elizabeth Branwell – who came to care for the children after the death of their mother, her sister Maria, and is remembered for ...”

“... Motion is not a condition but a desire to be outside of one’s self and all desire must be swept away so saith fatso Gautama bus-like under the shade of some shrub in the Deer Park in some grove some municipal greensward chewing a leaf that has left him stoned as a stone stone-like mouthing this sententious drivel some errand-boy some rich man’s son dutifully sets down on a dusty tablet ignoring the insects and snakes After midnight under the arc-lights like a giant sound stage the abandoned set of an action spectacular Mrs Kiniski’s team goes bus to bus hoovering candy-wrappers crumbs and then with their scrapers attending to the grease and impacted filth and gum as Rudolfo sluices away in the south-east corner and the boss, with a sigh comes to the end of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha Phalanx upon phalanx of impassive Buddha-wagons silver hulls and red trim Fleet of the Three Jewels the Attainment & Perfection City Transit Corp ...”

“... the great man said, all happy families are not alike,’ he tells us (as a narrator he is prone to self-justification and literary allusion): happiness for the Quinns means Felix manoeuvring his wife, Marisa, into the vicinity of a hunky man and then fading expectantly into the background. He turns up late to their dance lessons, hoping to find her tangoing ...”

“... When we say that nobody but God can see into a human heart, ‘nobody’ includes one’s own self, ‘if only because our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the presence of others that we can never be sure of anything that only we ourselves know and no one else’. The consequence of this is that our entire psychological life is cursed with ...”

“... but widened afterwards. Certain details have survived: he recalls explaining in a ‘hushed and self-important’ voice to the headteacher, two days after her death, why he hasn’t done his homework. But much from that time remains a mystery, and there are as many questions as answers in the account. For instance, it’s unfathomable to Frayn how his ...”

“... can only mean a greater or smaller degree of collaboration in a civilised society’s process of self-destruction.’ To build, he suggested, would be to take part in the crime of the century, that is to say, the destruction of the traditional European city. ‘I can only make architecture,’ he said in the 1970s, ‘because I do not build. I do not build ...”

“... who subjected truth and reason to political passion and deified the nation’s immediate self-interest. ‘They seem to clamour: “Finally we are allowed to adore ourselves and our wish to be great, not good.”’ Written in the mid-1920s, these words call to mind the slogans totalitarian politicians were soon to adopt. In Mussolini’s ...”

“... after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants and civilians: in short, a new class of outlaw. The potential impact of this doctrine on the morality of state ...”

“... for the Sam she knows. Her friend, her only son. Elisa recoils from the choices her other self has made, and the reader recoils with her, but she is hardly in a position to pass judgment, since her horror at herself and her life in the world in which Silas has survived amounts to wishing her son dead. She never explicitly asks herself whether it’s ...”

“... boy.’ In a more intricate move he decides he might want to use ‘exist’ as a transitive verb. Self-creation could be worded as ‘I exist me,’ and Pessoa claims that the phrase will have ‘expressed a whole philosophy in three small words’. Needless to say, he doesn’t write like this, and he is never obscure or confused. But he is very lucid about ...”

“... private publication in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost incidental. Most do not know what the text as a whole is like: the best-known portions take up only one of its ...”

“... peoples seemed to promise that small nation-states and imperial territories could look forward to self-determination. Women, many of whom had been active in war work, wanted a role in shaping the peace. Those who had opposed militarism were also optimistic that women might find a place in the postwar settlement.This was not, as historians have tended to ...”