“... Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), she did so, as she explained, partly in ‘self-defence’, aware that at least ‘five American biographers’ were then writing their versions of her life. Some had been in touch and had been given short shrift; others she had never met. ‘Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly ...”

“... orderly, tradition-bound past in the face of that squalid cult of anarchic subjectivism, self-expressive personality, economic laissez-faire, Protestant ‘inner light’ and Bolshevik subversion which Eliot lumped together with cavalier indiscriminateness under the name of ‘Whiggery’. This Janus-faced temporality, in which one turns to the ...”

“... would be deliberately to kill Rosie. Lord Justice Ward argued that this act was one of ‘quasi self-defence’ (with the doctors acting on Gracie’s behalf). Rosie, he wrote, ‘may have a right to life, but she has little right to be alive. She is alive because and only because, to put it bluntly, but nonetheless accurately, she sucks the lifeblood of ...”

“... Xtopher,’ Stephen Spender wrote in April 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task ...”

“... and bewildered viewpoint). Patrick can get no comfort, either, from his mother, Eleanor, a cold, self-conscious, self-absorbed heiress. By the time we join Patrick in the second novel, Bad News, he is in his mid-twenties, is in New York to collect his father’s ashes, and has become a fizzing pill of rage and grief and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Utopia is the most self-undermining of literary forms. If an ideal society can be portrayed only in the language of the present, it risks being betrayed as soon as we speak of it. Anything we can speak of must fall short of the otherness we desire. Utopias rebel against the unimaginativeness of the present, and in doing so find themselves simply reproducing it ...”

“... in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the ...”

“... and anxiety that give the novel its name and frame its action as well as his own evolving self-understanding. Intertwined with both is his transformation into a reader and a writer. The last is a slow process: reading is at first a way to protect his consciousness by giving it something to focus on. He realises it has this effect when he stays up all ...”

“... a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the Palestinians to re-enter the struggle, the actions of Israel will surely guarantee the permanence of this war. In this context, Trump’s claim in October to have personally resolved ...”

“... and partial understanding of aspects of everyday social life, and leads in stages of increasing self-knowledge to a grasp of the totality’ – and to find a place for himself in the emergent modern world. Rose read the Phenomenology, too, as a Bildungsroman,which recapitulates the play of personae – the story of how natural consciousness acquired ...”

“... cannot be taught new tricks – and those they have are all predictable. They guard their kennels self-importantly, mark out their territory in wind and piss, bark righteously for any trifling cause. follow the pack in every bloody thing. All their affection’s of the boisterous kind – they’re awfully free with dandruff, spittle, hair. The eviller ones ...”

“... china hasn’t been auctioned off to keep me at school. Best of all, the Marie Laurencin self-portrait didn’t go down with the rest of the stuff on its way to Portugal. Its brown smudges of eyes look out across the fields as if they were looking into the future. One of our old musicals is playing on the broken radiogram. I lean on the back of the ...”