“... another man he marries a woman he doesn’t love and goes into exile on Cape Wrath. His bitter self-denial sows the seeds of his monstrous double life: after meeting Molly again in London by chance, he spends two months every year with her. Silver’s search for a story – and an identity – ends up with this Victorian melodrama at its centre. In her ...”

“... of large numbers of atoms. Examples of emergence include the hardness of crystals, the self-organisation of vast numbers of atoms that we know as life, and even the most fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s laws of motion. Emergence is said to occur when a physical phenomenon arises as a result of organisation among any component ...”

“... Andrew Knight was riding high. Most people lost their arguments with him. The key weapon here is self-deprecation. Deedes’s account of Conrad Black is somewhat similar, although written before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful ...”

“... and Barth’s friend, Ambrose Mensch. A rival candidate for the doctorate is Andrew Cook, ‘self-styled Laureate of Maryland’, an appalling versifier and a devout right-winger – though some suspect that these manifestations may be the ingenious cover of a dangerous revolutionary. Cook himself, of course, A.B. Cook VI, is one of the novel’s seven ...”

“... inappropriate. Ruskin makes legends the way most people give excuses, but extraction of the self-contented skeleton traduces its effect in place. That one begins as a wisecrack, feeble but welcome in the circumstances. At least, it would have been a wisecrack had not Mr Harbison spoilt the symmetry between making legends and making excuses by changing ...”

“... while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory accounts of diplomats, who always believe they are closer to the workings of power than they really are – has been vigorously challenged by any number of historians.Hunting the Falcon is written as though it’s indisputable that the rise ...”

“... Renata seems less a character based on a person than a projection of the narrator’s own self-hatred, the two representing a psychic split in which both ageing wife and ugly stepdaughter are duelling aspects of the same person. Similarly, the women in The Fate of Mary Rose (written five years later) are slippery projections of the narrator, a ...”

“... Badar (‘an ex-houseboy turned flunky in a small hotel’) and Karim (a ‘lanky, soft-spoken, self-possessed’ civil servant) there’s Karim’s wife, Fauzia (a ‘composed and tranquil’ teacher and ‘book rat’). For a time, after the non-theft episode, the trio live together. Their struggles are those common to many young people: how to make a ...”

“... Siken’s new work shows him coming to terms with his changed body: ‘I wanted to defend my new self from my old self. I didn’t want to be him anymore. You live on this side now.’ The term ‘disability gain’ refers to the strengths or capacities that can arise from disabled experience. (Many blind people, for ...”

“... in its assumptions, economic and legal constraints and, finally, its power to awake loyalty and self-discipline, a noble family was then a major and possibly the decisive determinant of its members’ behaviour. The family of the future Choiseul had one characteristic, by no means unusual in his age, which was important for his career: its ramifications and ...”

“... years of the war,’ he writes, ‘de Valera’s attention was dominated by defence and national self-sufficiency. He stayed aloof from one of the few wars in modern times that really did involve the victory or the suppression of an evil creed, but he did so by adopting the same criteria of self-interest that governed the ...”

“... was to render this crisis with a calm savagery and clear-eyed shamelessness that reject self-pity and special pleading. E.M. Forster, who knew his way about this adolescent crisis, but who believed there could be beneficent muddles as well as vicious ones, seems actually to have thought Denton Welch too much in control and deficient in muddle. On ...”

“... right and left, a political battle in the narrowest sense. Or it may seem a conflict between the self-interested conservatism of men, and the imaginative radicalism of women, who, if they are feminists, tend now to present themselves as revolutionaries or nothing. Unsurprisingly, such dichotomies do not help us greatly in settling, at a practical ...”

“... Europe, on the United States and on the Soviet Union of this specifically British form of social self-indulgence – and thank God for Bevin, and for Nato. The expansiveness of the real Bevin is exhilarating, even in print. There is no trace here of foetid introversion. He saw foreigners as he did social classes: some of them were really all right, despite ...”

“... were substantial and dignified, in accordance with the confidence and satisfaction with the self that marked the culture of the prosperous male animal at that time. The hero of a Tolstoy novel will enjoy his ‘fine, clean, well-ironed linen nightshirt’, his fine silk dressing-gown, and even his toilette. ‘Having refreshed his plump, white, muscular ...”