“... leaving Wittenberg for a court grown purulent? He found himself unemployed, at best the self-appointed professional mourner. Offstage, Poland is racked with unrest. Four centuries later, Andrzej Wajda films Hamlet in gabled Cracow, where Faust (real and imagined) plied his dreadful trade; His legend, Hamlet’s, Bruno’s and that of Poland lives ...”

“... anyway, our dragon sits in style atop a glowing treasure-stack, and with the cool, expansive self- possession of his kind, grins extravagantly back at the blaze that enriches ...”

“... fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who had us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what form he would return, sometimes mere months later. Dirty Mind in no way predicts Around the World in a Day ...”

“... one of a whole series of metaphysical fictions which includes agents, objects, mental acts and the self. The fact that the self can be found in this list is one reason why getting shot of substance is not as simple as it might appear. If it cannot be allowed simply to drop out of the picture, it is partly because we may find ...”

“... man in the Hathaway shirt’). Up swelled one of those colossal bubbles of pompous self-regard, enclosing account execs and art directors and copywriters, that leave their sticky residue on history. It’s a commonplace that portrayal of the past can be used to criticise the present. What of those cases in which criticism of the past is used to ...”

“... after the Revolution in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, told me that my writing was deeply self-censored. I had left out the juicy stuff: the neighbour’s lesbian relationships, the opium addicts, the widespread plastic surgery, his incarceration. I did it to ‘protect people’, I told him. I wasn’t trying to sell books, I was trying to sell a ...”

“... cape fell on him. They breathed a sigh of relief. They were rid of the burden.’ Should this self-accusation be read as a comprehensive explanation of the family dynamic and its damage? It lies in the narrative alongside quite different suggestions: there are hints, for instance, of an ugly sexual history between the man and his daughters. A gagging ...”

“... violence: the names and causes change, the atrocities don’t. Christopher Tyerman exercises self-discipline in leaving to the last page of his text any explicit comparison between the Middle East in 1099 and in 2015. But on his very first page he introduces us to the Crusades as having their own, medieval Christian rationale: he wants us to avoid making ...”

“... On​ the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is doomed to end by putting itself out of the business of dictionary-making. Strictly speaking, all the definitions of the listed terms would have to be blanks, a new version of Flaubert’s dream of the ‘book about nothing’, a Dictionnaire des riens, replacing the Dictionnaire des idées reçues ...”

“... wearing glasses ‘at the age of eight. So did Edward, but he suffered for it more than I did.’ Self-inscription has featured in Carrère’s work since the true-crime book The Adversary (2001), which opens with the news that ‘while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting,’ and sporadically ...”

“... homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 diary entry), was all his life an avid voyeur of young males, Aschenbach is initially taken by surprise as he slowly realises that it was having to ...”

“... for the preposterous Sitwell family, having first given them a roasting for their insufferable self-importance, on the grounds that Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal figure of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the early years of the Cambridge English Faculty would greet a lecture ...”

“... the film as an adrenalin rush, a rollercoaster ride of carnage. We may empathise with the victim self-destructively, enjoying his and our own distress. Or we may switch allegiances, and side not with the victim, but with the killer who (apparently) suffers nothing. It’s a feature of undergraduate essays on film that they routinely celebrate whoever is ...”

“... is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark ...”

“... to abstract from my reading a book that would keep me company.’ What began as an exercise in self-edification grew into a 9000-page, 33-volume compendium of everything that exists in the universe, as it appeared from al-Nuwayri’s perspective in 14th-century Cairo: Nihayat al-Arab fi Funun al-Adab, or The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of ...”