“... 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 ...”

“... !document.querySelector("img.emoji")))twemoji.parse(document.body)}var t=document.createElement("style");t.type="text/css";var m="img.emoji{height:1em;width:1em;margin:0 .05em 0 .1em;vertical-align:-0.1em;}";if(t.styleSheet){t.styleSheet.cssText=m}else{t.appendChild(document.createTextNode(m))}document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(t);var a=document ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... You Also so powerful is that Steinberg doesn’t know what to make of himself: neither the younger self that he is trying to recollect nor the much older self who is struggling to write the book. He may not have liked Levi speaking for him and about him, but once he begins to reply, to answer back (and there is in almost ...”

“... these arguments and directs them at a generation he regards as either besotted with a belief in self-fashioning, a ‘dogmatic American voluntarism’ for which the world is ‘perpetually open’, or marked by a dialectically opposite sense of gloom and inertia deriving from a ‘culturalist or historicist hubris’ secure in the belief that nothing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Baker cites in his exhaustive biography is Wheatley’s own memoirs, and Wheatley was a relentless self-aggrandiser; but it sounds about right. In the mid-1960s, three decades into his career, he had 55 books in print, which collectively accounted for one seventh of Hutchinson’s turnover; Arrow, Hutchinson’s paperback imprint, was selling 1,150,000 ...”

“... determination. He sits on the left of the screen, irresolutely regarding her but full of apparent self-confidence, facing her as she stands on the right, tentative yet absolutely decided. She persuades, she confesses, she shows her strength in her willingness to surrender, and all he can do is agree that he loves her and yet feebly evade her. Her fervour ...”

“... to the history of musical modernism. Prokofiev was intolerant, impetuous and obnoxiously self-centred, but he had an unmatched musical ear, an eye for detail and a keen wit. His lexicon of invective and arcane slang is not easy to translate into English, but Phillips succeeds magnificently. Put-downs range from ‘haemorrhoidal’ to ...”

“... as well – nurses, for example. There is a sense in which the Dubliners Bono and Bob Geldof are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. The English and Scottish Catholic churches have always relied heavily on Irish priests to minister to parishioners who were themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sacked him after only two months). Yet even in the face of impending ruin, Himmler’s self-belief remained strong. In the final phase of the war, he began planning for the peace ahead. In the spring of 1945, orders went out to the camps to end the shooting of Jewish inmates. Communicating through his former personal physician, Felix Kersten, now ...”