“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... foreseeable effect on the future. And musings of that sort may help to establish a personality, a self of sorts, that provides connections between past, present and future. Driven to it, we might even claim to discern a structural relationship between events in childhood, youth, middle age and old age, chronologically remote elements that pertain to one ...”

“... narratives: either the survival of the human spirit in the face of inhuman brutality; or the self-sacrificial contribution to the Soviet national achievement. Figes’s own narrative is constructed around the idea of the family as a site of ‘human feelings and emotions’, a ‘moral sphere’ that was opposed to the ‘moral vacuum of the Stalinist ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... do justice to those excluded (often deliberately) by those codes? And how can the applause of the self-styled owners of those conventions and traditions be other than condescending and self-congratulatory? ‘Coolie Odyssey’ begins: Now that peasantry is in vogue Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... an inveterate liar is to do him less than justice. He was in fact a compulsive fantasist and self-inventor. The only child of Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement, he clung to his fantasies with such tenacity that they became the source of a precarious yet highly successful career as a writer and an authority on all matters ‘Oriental’ – a ...”

“... She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical ...”

“... boxes, packed away with the books, leaflets, articles, pamphlets, flyers, punk CDs and ‘Will Self Is Stupid’ badges Home gave me to help with my researches. So many different authors, formats, purports; except that all of it was really done by him. Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962, and, until recently, has lived and worked in Bethnal ...”

“... greatest single influence – Thoreau’s Walden – Auster writes crisply and sensuously about self-reliance, austerity and solitude. His novels are, almost without exception, inventive, elegant and deeply entertaining. Oracle Night follows the paradigm for most of Auster’s fiction, which goes something like this. There is a man. He is alone in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the ground, while dandies, belletrists and idealist philosophers are the social equivalent of self-indulgence in art. It is no wonder that he returns time and again to Don Quixote, with its clash between the fantasies of the master and the pragmatism of the man. The dreamers have turned language into an autonomous realm, Marx protests in The German ...”

“... listless these men may briefly become, like Coyote they bounce back, spurred by ambition and blind self-belief. When Donovan contacts James, now a lowly solicitor, and asks him to process his divorce, James imagines that his early dreams of a brilliant career will finally be realised, when what lies ahead is in fact more humiliation. At the end of The ...”