“... symbol and an advocate of the one male role never mentioned in rock and roll – that of father. Self-exiled in a country which idolised him without beginning to understand his talent, he was treated to that great nation’s highest reward for achievement – assassination. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or, as the motto of the Quarry Bank Boys Grammar School put ...”

“... after Aristide’s death, would have delighted Mr Gradgrind. Boucicaut himself was entirely self-made, the son of a Normandy hatter who began his career as the associate of a peddler. His wife was illegitimate. In 1852, with 50,000 francs of saved or borrowed capital, he and a partner bought the Bon Marché, which, at the time, had a staff of ...”

“... in love? I can’t believe it. Indeed I think it is female vice. Women are naturally vain and self-centred, interested only in themselves or what other people think of them; boasting in old age is what they are all too liable to come to. When Nancy smarts, Ackerley surreptitiously snickers: ‘I remember Nancy saying to me, “I believe you’d sacrifice ...”

“... historic rights associated with it, absolutely transcend other values, including those of rational self-interest. Rational interests dictate that Israel should integrate itself into the region by making sufficient accommodation with the Palestinians to satisfy the minimum desire of the latter for self-determination. Such a ...”

“... the other hand: utterly unlike such bravura performers as Lacan and Derrida, he is magisterially self-effacing. Blanchot is a name in France, but not a face or a living presence. He is not seen in public and he does not pronounce on the issues of the day, nor put his signature to those spectacular round-robins by which intellectuals manifest their ...”

“... et l’Architecte – an allusion to Marx’s distinction between the unthinking bee and that self-conscious builder, man. Mitterrand’s musings contain more wheat than chaff: they also suggest that he’s an artful architect, not just a bee. ‘One must be born in the provinces and feel one’s roots in order to understand instinctively the relationship ...”

“... notorious that all societies manifest some sense of their history as part of their own collective self-consciousness. The past is drawn upon selectively, compounding nationhood, cultural heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify ...”

“... between the writer Heinrich von Kleist and a poet, Karoline von Günderrode. Kleist, cruel and self-lacerating, his mind ‘a machine which is made to run at full speed while at the same time the brake is being applied’, is unable to place himself within Prussian bureaucracy and militarism, but is ambitious, eager to challenge Goethe. Günderrode, though ...”

“... in that collection, or of the Granada Lecture reviewed above, is concerned only with his own self-interest. Of course politicians are ambitious, but we can only judge the measure in which they put self before country or party in the light of what they say and do; and, as Haseler must know, accusations of corruption or ...”

“... 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 ...”