“... outward performance, not inward essence. No doubt Swift was drawn to La Rochefoucauld’s view of self-love as central to human nature, and when presenting one of his best-known poems as ‘occasioned’ by the Maxims, picked a passage so cynical that La Rochefoucauld had purged it from his definitive edition of 1678. The epigraph to ‘Verses on the Death of ...”

“... a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic of her resilient self-belief – or defensive bluster, depending which way you read it. ‘Aut inveniam viam, aut faciam,’ she wrote on the flyleaf of all her diaries: ‘I will either find out a way, or make one.’ For a ‘creative writer’, university would have been ...”

“... hesitate to list them, and sometimes summarise them, for pages on end. Nowhere is 4321 more self-congratulatory than on the subject of race. The white protagonists of this book are morally unimpeachable; Amy, in one timeline, becomes a civil rights activist who dates a black man, and Ferguson is routinely presented with opportunities to demonstrate that ...”

“... be ‘more positively on the side of authority’, and professed himself ‘disgusted by their self-satisfied attitude’. One BBC programme was denounced as a ‘party political broadcast for the IRA … glorifying violence and fostering a new generation of killers’. Similar comments were made throughout the conflict by spokesmen for both major ...”

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“... Elizabeth Holmes​ was said to be the ‘youngest self-made female billionaire’ of all time. And why not? Her invention was going to be the reason people – Americans first, but eventually everyone in the world – would lead better, healthier, longer lives. Why shouldn’t she have a private jet, a private chef, a team of bodyguards who would say into their mouthpieces: ‘Eagle One is on the move’? She would tell her investors: ‘We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm ...”

“... previous novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, we hear little else, ‘each explosion tight and self-contained, like a huge bag of marbles being emptied over a cement floor’. Set during the last days of the war, it’s unsparing from the off (‘Most children have two whole legs and two whole arms,’ runs the opening sentence, ‘but this little ...”

“... the continent during the 1960s: Havana’s revolutionary fervour was tempered by its instinct for self-preservation and Castro didn’t want to give the US a pretext to invade; he understood that sending Cubans off to fight in Latin America would be far more provocative than bringing in hundreds of Latin Americans to the island for training. Between 1961 and ...”

“... a few years at a day school in Yorkshire, where she learned to read and write, she was entirely self-taught. The usual choices available to a late 18th-century woman without any financial provision were few and seemed to her unpleasant: paid companion, schoolteacher, or governess. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she voiced a hearty distaste for ...”

“... people across 48 countries, published in 2015, indicated that women have significantly lower self-esteem than men. In trying to account for that striking finding, you can either choose to probe the brain’s self-evaluation centres and tell just-so stories about archaic humans, or you can take seriously the fact that ...”

“... more leisurely, less aggressive colloquialism. Enright’s refusal to acknowledge art as a self-justifying absolute – as Larkin did, whatever his protestations to the contrary – is crucial to what might be called the social dimension of Enright’s poetry: its genial, raconteurish tone, its willingness to negotiate with foreign countries and ...”

“... arms – the Andrew Doria received an official salute. By recognising American independence, a self-serving Dutch colonial governor triggered a major confrontation between Britain and the Netherlands. The British authorities badgered the Dutch, but since the Dutch had allowed their once-formidable Navy to decay, they were in no position to defend national ...”

“... though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration – are far outnumbered by ...”

“... Marr has written of that whole life’s production – a writing life as strenuous, racked and self-questioning as any gaping aficionado of tortured genius might ask – in ways that support all the sensible things Barthes and Foucault ever said about the conditions and constraints of authorship. Not that Marr, who is a lawyer, an investigative journalist ...”

“... the sheep. Murakami’s hunch-playing detective wears the mantle of Philip Marlowe a little self-consciously. He’s memorised the murderer’s name in every Ellery Queen mystery, advises people to ‘tell it to me straight, because that’s my favourite angle,’ and specialises in the sardonic wisecrack (a mother and child ‘look like a couple whose ...”