“... well known to a higher art – between a friendly face and the goods it is offering. The feminine self-gift – ‘That I might there present it ... O, to whom?’ – has its basic charm in the relation between the giver and the given: the unique, personal and potentially lovable self, which is offering its necessarily ...”

“... Elizabeth felt herself close to madness and death. The woman who frequently described her younger self as impetuous and ‘headlong’ became terrified of exerting her seemingly fatal will – especially against the bias of her father’s desire – and terrified of doing anything further to break up the family. As Karlin notes, it was the daughter rather ...”

“... first in Highgate, then in Bexley Heath, and Mary turned herself into a striking example of self-help, studying geography, Latin and medicine from the books in her father’s library, and plumbing from the English Mechanic, while George roamed round the world as a gentlemanly travelling physician. In one biography after another, including the present ...”

“... the preparation, purification, standardisation and marketing of insulin in a form suitable for self-administration by the afflicted patients. The entire episode brought to an end, with an appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as ...”

“... has a wine cellar and an attic.’ For sale separately, or as one lot. When talk turns to writing, self-love goes into overdrive. ‘I keep my manuscripts in one closet, my clothes in another.’ (Never trust anyone who talks to you about his manuscripts; still less anyone who wears them.) There is some terrible attitudinising: Writing, actually, is reading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all that. And I want all that and I want all that.’ Or like the fast-food, fast-sex junkie John Self of Money, who always gets less than he bargains for, yet keeps going back for more: ‘I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money.’ Amis goes to any length to remind us of our whole-hearted addiction to the ...”

“... the past; simultaneously, he adopts a compensatory series of rhetorical ploys to erase or escape self-awareness, and salvage whatever dignity might be left to him. Age, then, is associated with self-deception and a circumlocutory evasiveness that is both escapist and curiously life-affirming, in that it helps the old to ...”

“... of Into Thin Air. One need not be a climber to learn from this admirably written book, a work of self-professed catharsis free of mawkishness, blame or a prurient interest in death. Human error and poor judgment played a decisive part in the disaster, but Krakauer sounds an important note of caution: in the midst of all the postmortem ratiocination, it is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it began to lose some of its teeth: so much so, after a while, that one regular panellist, Will Self, announced he would no longer be taking part. At its erratic best, however, it remains a worthwhile show. In fact the Guardian columnist Martin Kettle went so far a couple of years ago as to call Ian Hislop, on the basis of his weekly appearances ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

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“... 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 ...”