“... ideas seem blindingly simple. Republican nationalism is by tradition committed to the right of self-determination of the people of Ireland. Suppose, however, that the people of Ireland, in exercising this right, decide that they intend to enjoy full control over their island only when a majority of those living in that part of the island known as Northern ...”

“... Gilbert had let her know that he was reading her books on Emily. As his thin lips stretched to a self-satisfied smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed. The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. And, right there, precisely when the reader might be tempted to roll her eyes, is a photograph of Cousin Gilbert, the long ...”

“... and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste. Open-minded, self-critical, conciliatory – it couldn’t last. Mailer’s later career wasn’t an exercise in dismantling the male ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had ...”

“... must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction in terms.’ As late as 2001, the epidemiologist Walter ...”

“... want Hawa to be? What must she be, to satisfy his research demands? We associate marginality with self-consciousness, with the possibility of critical distance; the outsider becomes a sociologist. Yet Hawa cannot be placed: she is not outside or inside, or between; her position is shifting, and everything around her is shifting. It is all rather a puzzle; in ...”

“... had writhed under his satire and resented what they saw as his systematic undermining of German self-confidence, were enchanted. What a downfall to relish! He, too, the mighty novelist accepted by the outside world as Germany’s political conscience, had hidden his past. But there are many more Germans who had used those early novels – The Tin Drum, Cat ...”

“... sanity would follow. How the crucial sense that we were all trying to break free of a collective self-deception played out still puzzles me. Among people I knew after I left school, there was a buzzing convergence between those on the left, with clear-minded things to say about false consciousness, and those who had come down the winding road of the ...”

“... of a dissolute father and an unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s ...”

“... of the 19th century and as far from a good Samaritan as anyone could imagine. Restell was a self-publicist on an epic scale who was said to possess an ‘inordinate greed for money’. She marketed herself as an exotic Frenchwoman with decades of training in women’s medicine when she was really a seamstress from a small town in the Cotswolds who never ...”

“... and magnificence. For Lear to be stripped of his train of a hundred knights was for his royal self to be publicly undone: the servantless master, like the masterless man, became, in a profound sense, ‘nothing’.The idea of the servant’s personality being absorbed by the persona of his master helps to explain how the vocabulary of service was so ...”

“... who was a literate man, shows something of the same ambition, the same nerve, the same boisterous self-confidence. But the Sonnets inscription has more than this to provoke thought. Either T.T. or Mr W.H. is in some sense so much in touch with Shakespeare’s work as to seem to be in touch with Shakespeare too. The ‘ONLIE.BEGETTER.’ is a case in ...”

“... information, merely associative, are here used to create the work’s meaning. In Mark Quinn’s Self, a Saatchi example, the fact that the frozen head is a cast of his own, and is made of solid blood, and his own blood, and a full nine pints of it – none of this visually evident – are important points of attention. You have to have them. And this is ...”

“... be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and ...”

“... contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a self-ratifying ‘Sense of Wonder’. This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ...”

“... more than a day at most. She must think of it as one day at a time. She must look composed, sexy, self-contained; mustn’t look needy and impatient for the others to arrive; must look like someone who can look after herself. While taking care at all times to act natural. What that meant in the short term was that she should make some breakfast. She hadn’t ...”