“... story ‘Flight’); he was supposed to be the one who got to go everywhere. In his 1988 memoir Self-Consciousness (a sort of pre-emptive strike against biographers that Begley both exploits and shows to be evasive), he calls Nancy Nora: It was courtesy of Nora that I discovered breasts are not glazed bouffant orbs pushing up out of a prom dress but soft ...”

“... in. People come along as a first step in the effort to start uncovering and developing their own self-relations and their relations to the world. ‘Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language … The notion of “finding your voice”, simplistic as it may sound, is … a social goal.’ Thus, presumably, the genesis of ...”

“... Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of confession as self-exoneration. Negri had been accused by many people of doing many unpalatable things. She had to prove that she had truly loved Valentino and not betrayed his memory; that she hadn’t abandoned her native Poland; that she had never been Hitler’s mistress ...”

“... If you were​ throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son with his divorced first wife, caught syphilis in his wanderlust around South America as a merchant seaman, and attempted suicide in a Greenwich Village fleabag called ‘the Hell Hole’ by its permanently pie-eyed denizens ...”

“... features such as carriage-lamps or stone lions, often having more to do with the resident’s self-image than with the architecture. Grandeur has its obligations: if your three epigraphs are from Antigone, Bunyan (Grace Abounding) and Goethe (Faust Part Two), you’d better follow through with something formidable – as Under the Volcano does. Joseph ...”

“... own trash, was overrun with rich tech people who defied the festival’s precious tenet of radical self-reliance with their over-reliance on paid staff. Burning Man, which started in 1986 when twenty people burned an effigy on a beach, was turning into a dusty version of Davos. Old-timers lamented the rise of ‘plug and play’ culture. There were too many ...”

“... Murakami isn’t proud of them.) It uses the voice of a disgruntled, detached Tokyo hipster, self-raised on Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler and Dostoevsky, to tell an unlikely noir story: a nameless Boku goes in search of an old friend and a mysterious sheep on the orders of a shadowy tycoon. It’s a consciously Chandleresque set-up, which, in ...”

“... intensified and projected onto a global stage, is in Dower’s view either delusional or cynically self-serving. It led to the launch of a war on ‘evil’ under the sign of humanitarianism and with the assumed imprimatur of God – biblical quotations, mostly from Old Testament prophets, appeared on Bush’s briefing papers during Operation Iraqi ...”

“... renouncing them. ‘A deacon I was and deacon I must remain.’ He later told Carlyle: ‘My own self … was falling to wreck when I first came to know you.’ Carlyle gave him something to believe in and do, because Carlyle believed that divine revelation wasn’t in scripture but in providence. Writing history was therefore a sacramental act, a means to ...”

“... particularly nationalist – he just thinks it’s more democratic for countries to be small and self-governing, and the geography of Scotland makes a ‘national container’ of a handy size. And Scotland doesn’t even make for a self-identical container, such as a bowl: it’s a ‘cluster of islands’ – or city ...”

“... and formal procedures, reading resolutions and exegeses that explained, in the characteristic self-satisfied tone of Soviet bureaucratic documentation, that the wise decisions of the Party’s Central Committee and Council of Ministers had been duly disseminated, hailed by the public, and implemented. At the same time, he was making friends in ...”

“... looking for here was not the ridiculous but the criminal’. And finally, to return to the sunny, self-rescuing Camus, our murderer resents ‘the insolent certainty’ of the process that will lead to his death, the absence of pardon or appeal or escape, ‘the ridiculous disproportion between the judgment at the basis of it and its imperturbable unfolding ...”

“... third novel, his fourth book when you include the Tintin one, and part of an ambitious self-managed campaign that also includes propaganda, film (he wrote the story, adapted from Borges, told in Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take), and conceptual artworks, the latter largely from his position as general secretary of the International Necronautical ...”

“... sake of freedom. Again, the distribution of income and wealth that the market produced was neither self-evidently fair nor always socially beneficial. If the distribution became too unequal, or damaged society in other ways, government had to intervene. There was nothing intrinsically valuable in the market itself. In an agenda-setting speech, delivered at the ...”

“... the life of the prophet – violent, intolerant, misogynistic – that Muslims were incapable of self-rule. ‘These days, I am a little disturbed,’ the Mughal aristocrat Sir Syed Ahmad Khan wrote in his diary in the summer of 1869. ‘I am reading Muir sahib’s book … It has burned my heart.’ A founding father of Islamic modernism, which attempted to ...”