“... Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain ...”

“... without them in the 1933 Supplement. This was the decision of the new Supplement’s chief editor, Robert Burchfield. Ogilvie criticises Burchfield, and her book has caused some fuss on account of its supposed allegation that he surreptitiously deleted words of foreign origin from the OED. She contends that by bringing back the tramlines Burchfield was ...”

“... concept of his science of roughness. What are fractals? The short answer is mathematical models of self-similarity and self-resemblance: objects whose parts mimic the whole. Natural examples abound: a cauliflower is made up of florets, or miniature cauliflowers, each of which in turn is composed of smaller florets, and so ...”

“... less of a stabilising force than they seem. Deadpan yet tongue in cheek, they constantly slip into self-mockery and teasing. ‘Some of my most classic cases,’ Holmes says, ‘have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley ...”

“... a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and caprice’. Richard, anti-social, a hypochondriac and old enough to be ...”

“... novels, is ultimately immutable, and Flanagan’s heroes reserve their bitterest scorn for the self-interested purveyors of the ‘necessary, sustaining lie’. Flanagan’s latest novel is a work of a different order of ambition, and its approach is at once more playful and more pessimistic. The narrative is circular, but this time its significance is ...”

“... in support the poem Maxims I, with its advice (putting it in 20th-century terms) to encourage the self-esteem of the young. Rich, stable, liberal and progressive: why did they lose to a bunch of pirates? The phenomenon certainly seems to demand an explanation, though there may be more than one. Wood starts with a broad perspective and narrows down steadily to ...”

“... title might as well as have been a message from Washington via Hollywood to Tehran.Why would a self-professed liberal like Ben Affleck – who majored in Middle East studies – show such insensitivity? The main reason, many scholars would argue, is Orientalism. When Edward Said elaborated his critique of Western scholarship about the ‘East’ in ...”

“... Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic barrister with political ambitions. Their daughter Rachel (almost immediately known ...”

“... a Bible in a tube of sunlight’. So, all right, there is no comma here – Morrison’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, said he was always inserting commas into her sentences and she was always taking them out again – but it is not so distinctive as the word ‘tube’. Thirty-four years ago, I stopped reading, right here, to puzzle whether this should be a ...”

“... Rebellion of 1641 between them dominate the proximate causation of the English Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect ...”

“... and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of ...”

“... repress a harsh answer, to confess to a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her ...”

“... doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously ...”

“... through the promise of free exploration and rebirth, to the blank acceptance or celebration of self-extinction. In the act of ‘discovering America’, Conrad tells us in the introductory chapter, these writers were really ‘discovering’ themselves. And yet all of them were known to be what they were, for good or ill, before they got there. What really ...”