“... would want to appear, it was because since childhood she had been anxiously polishing her own self-image. Born in 1741 in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and an Austrian father, Kauffman was an accomplished artist by the age of 12. It was then that she painted the first of her many self-portraits and the last in which she ...”

“... or freeing a rich Danish recluse from blackmailers, but beyond this they are voyages of self-discovery, quests for self-knowledge, searchings for one’s soul, ending in regeneration or rebirth in life, or in self-sacrifice and transfiguration in death. One would not wish to ...”

“... on the subject is entirely his own: it is not the revenge one minds so much as the perpetual self-glorification of these saints and martyrs and their profound impudence. How one loathes them in their ‘new white garments’. How disgusting their priggish rule must be! How vile is their spirit, really, insisting, simply insisting on wiping out the whole ...”

“... her only recourse is to victimise herself more shockingly than even her enemies can. And with her self-inflicted wounds she is supposed to win a kind of freedom. We encounter the heroine at the inaugural moment of her first messy period and awkward bra. As a girl, Sadie is neglected by a moderately amiable mother and abused by a drunken stockbroker ...”

“... her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted by a lack of self-understanding. In Love (1997), which unfolds over a single night in northern Norway, Jon thinks endlessly of the celebration he imagines his mother, Vibeke, is planning for his ninth birthday. Vibeke, meanwhile, focuses on anything but Jon, among them a ...”

“... the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton designed kitchenless cities where everyone ...”

“... of thoughts totally uninfluenced by the existence of mechanics and their grubby mechanisms. The self-appointed cardinal, Arthur Koestler, ever vigilant for the appearance of mechanistic heresy, exploded with vitriol all over the pages of the Sunday Times when reviewing this book. There are those who would take such an attack as a compliment and a ...”

“... we accept her assessment of other characters, for example of Presbon, who has ‘the gift of self-deception’, and Akamas, who compensates for his ignorance of human nature by presenting himself as a just man. The voices give us six different analyses of the events leading to Medea’s downfall: taken together they leave the impression that the process ...”

“... migration be on a sufficiently formidable scale that the migrants can form a reasonably self-contained social community; second, that the distance from the metropole be vast enough to prevent easy absorption into metropolitan culture. By the end of the 18th century there were no less than 3,200,000 ‘whites’ within the 16,900,000 population of ...”

“... revolting memories to surge up before my closed eyes, almost burning the closed lids with fiery self-disgust, did I kill a moral nerve? To flinch from such memories, simply suppress them, might have been healthier. Is it right to overcome self-disgust? Well, in any case I learned the trick of it. Nobody told me; I found ...”

“... Arthur Koestler, however, Galileo was the victim of his own fatal flaws: ‘vanity, jealousy and self-righteousness combined into a demoniac force which drove him to the brink of self-destruction’. According to Stillman Drake, who has devoted a lifetime of research to Galileo, Galileo was a zealot, not for Copernicus but ...”

“... himself. He was a snob and a gossip and his letters are so laden with ambivalence, bitterness and self-loathing, so much studied nonchalance and self-absorption, that any respite fills the reader with a ghastly burst of gratitude. There are moments of kindness and forbearance in his correspondence with the novelist ...”

“... of 26 January 1900, celebrating the centenary of the First Fleet’s arrival, had a jubilant and self-confident view of themselves, not as the transplanted pawns of empire in exile at the ‘world’s worse end’, but as Australians, a lucky people, fiercely independent, with hope and initiative in their tucker bags. In spite of plague and hard times, grand ...”

“... which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis. ‘America’, he began, is a young country with an old mentality ... But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always has a comic and unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds ...”

“... not have been murder. Both novels are cramped by the country house and by the agoraphobic woman self-imprisoned there. The reader is glad to come up for fresh air on leaving such claustrophobic narrative space. Whether those characters who are left alive by the final page will find exits and oxygen is less certain, though the prognosis is cautiously ...”