“... teleology, or accord such prominence to genealogy. Today even the toreros, once paragons of self-made Spanish manhood, mostly issue from a privileged handful of matador or rancher lineages. (Dynastic dementia: until recently, when a bull was smart enough to kill a man, the dam was slaughtered in an act of genetic misogyny.) But perhaps it’s because ...”

“... a more public-spirited, Confucian version of the Protestant ethic – to the 19th century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this time on its exportable civilisation, but on its particular culture. The disparity between the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Celtic Tiger was starting to roar, but belonged in spirit to an earlier, less well-heeled and self-assured society. Most of the book is set on the wild western coast of County Mayo, a place with some symbolic resonance in Irish letters. It is the setting for Synge’s great drama The Playboy of the Western World, and has come to be associated with all ...”

“... and the vicissitudes of nation-building are less compelling subjects than the everyday task of self-individuation. Their cultural reference points are eclectic and varied, their relationship with the tribal pieties of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation often tongue-in-cheek. To be pigeonholed by well-meaning readers, in spite of this, as a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Perhaps it’s a new kind of narcissism, where you only get to feel fully realised, successful and self-loving when you look at your reflection in the pool and see your idol. And having your idol’s shoes and handbag is one of the ways to achieve that. Fame today is a matryoshka doll: inside each celebrity is a series of smaller, hollow simulacra, and, at the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... themselves, and thus tend to practise what they preach. Studying sexuality is always at some level self-study, rather as writing about popular culture, for most of the students who do it these days, involves watching movies and TV shows they would have watched anyway. There is thus a convenient continuity between one’s academic and one’s actual life, as ...”

“... Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the books with her mother, intended them to be a defence of ‘the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man’ whom she saw ‘penalised from every direction’, but especially by the New Deal, which was ‘killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit’. She told a friend that if only there were a politician ...”

“... and too little creation’. This mode brings you Tolstoy’s historiography, or the relentless self-commentary of certain metafictionists. But there’s another option: the novel that doesn’t alternate drama and analysis but dramatises analysis itself. In such novels, characters are understood more by what they think and say than by what they do, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”