“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... leaves shiver silent chimes beyond the glass brings either the rapture [my children . . .] or self-criticism  of one who comes with a theory [. . . are an economy of scarcity] of myself there is no more evidence to admit – only consistent with limestone’s incessant weeping cave a madonna’s ...”

“... his mission, he could neither move to Greenland nor learn the language. Denmark had no truck with self-employed preachers settling in its territory, and there were no Greenlandic teaching materials in English. Shull moved to Reykjavik, and while he fought for the right to set up his church in Greenland, he began translating Danish-language Greenlandic ...”

“... If one turns to what China Diary actually is, one has to say that it is a mildly narcissistic, self-indulgent ramble, quite pleasant to read, and with occasional flashes of insight. Thus Spender remarks that ‘there are times in China when the tourists seem totally disconnected from the places they are visiting... like the plug of the television set in ...”

“... money to a diamond-smuggling stranger from Sierra Leone, who promptly took off with it, as any self-respecting diamond-smuggler would. Whereupon our intrepid autobiographer swore a mighty oath against the smugglers, and rounded up a small army of mercenaries from the bars of Monrovia, who were apparently so impressed with his air of command that they ...”

“... all summer, has often asked himself. We know this because Cummings’s sprawling and fantastically self-revealing blog (still live at the time of writing) is punctuated with thoughts about Bismarck. For Cummings, Bismarck is the sacred monster of tactical politics, the genius statesman whose political moves repeatedly surprised and wrong-footed friends and ...”

“... on the move’, were also the result of a desire to turn the tables on the world. Made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child, as an adult she ensured that everyone else should be conscious of it too. Clothes come between the naked self and the world, as does writing. Where the dividing line is drawn ...”