“... Road. At the preliminary dinner with his co-panellists, he drinks too much, enamoured of this self-important world in which ignorant opinions are exchanged to choruses of approval. But as the arc-lights go up and the experts take their places, veterans dispense with deference, leaving Dyson to platitudes of ‘absolute fascination’. The alternative to ...”

“... early as 1911’, when an emotional bereavement had opened his eyes to the need for more complete self-commitment. Lukacs’s conversion, on this view, is analogous to that of the young Karl Marx: the theorist of alienation converted to Communism under the pressure of political events. And this conversion has been assigned exemplary significance. ‘After ...”

“... the poet’s long-continued search for his father is blended with myth, ‘a strange voyage of self-discovery by the poet’s legendary ancestor’, Immram Mael Duin. Base camp is a pool-hall in New York:Not the kind of place you took your wifeUnless she had it in mind to stripOr you had a mind to put her up for sale.No dream-vision this: the poet is ...”

“... for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky devil, who fell down a flight of stairs when he was three and ...”

“... turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful, but either ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Palestinians outside the territories, just as they were slow to recognise how independent and self-reliant the population of ‘endurers’ had become in the process of creating a civil society – including schools, universities, hospitals, sports teams and theatres –under occupation. Subtly, Shehadeh admonishes the Diaspora for its continuing failure ...”

“... of Part (or Act) V. Its plot is related by two characters called Portia and Cylinda, who tell a self-consciously Shakespearean story of the fortunes and romances of an improvident father and his three children. Running alongside and over the top of this is a series of exchanges and arguments between the speaking characters: Portia, Cylinda, an allegorical ...”

“... he writes, intimating that until you become an enigma to yourself nothing can change; as though self-knowledge had been the problem, not the solution. The mother in Carrère’s novel, like the young Augustine, wanted something more than her world seems to offer, while not being allowed to believe in another world. ‘Let me not be my own life,’ Augustine ...”

“... time of the month’. Like so many products aimed at women, from deodorants to diets to self-help books, the tampon business helps to create the very anxieties it claims to allay. Where else do women get the idea that menstrual odour is something they need to be vigilant about? Certainly not from having smelled it on other women. Considering what a ...”

“... a human being’, but now he realised that the world was an illusion, and he learned to leave his self behind and inhabit a shadow existence. Before, he had written ‘mainly lyrical poetry’. Now he ‘discovered a strange and unique phenomenon: that words themselves acted like drops of liquid mercury splashing about, moving in any direction’. He called ...”

“... to speak to Michael Finkel of the New York Times. Clinging onto the last vestiges of his old self, Finkel said it was he. The reporter from the Oregonian said that a man named Christian Longo, who appeared to have killed his wife and three children, was on the run in Mexico, posing as a journalist from the New York Times called Michael Finkel. One might ...”