“... Yet he is wakeful, too – intelligent, droll, social, especially good at capturing snobbery’s self-grooming. He has a beautifully loitering instinct for form and sentence: his novels never hustle themselves to conclusion, or to heavily obvious theme. The Spell flows with all these qualities, but is not a very ambitious or driven book (and differs sharply ...”

“... paternalist faction at odds with free market economics: it was a discussion group that encouraged self-critical debate within the party, its membership deliberately not confined to any single position. Its founding members included proto-Thatcherite free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Angus Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based ...”

“... implausible plotting only makes the act of employing a surrogate seem all the more arbitrary and self-indulgent. Each time the camera lingers lovingly on another tasteful detail of the family’s upper middle-class home, we wonder whether we are expected to fear for the heroine or resent her.Gloria Erlich’s new study of Edith Wharton also traces the dire ...”

“... with extramission and loss, owes something to a childhood metaphysics about growth and the self. It is described very beautifully in a discussion about Hamlet and his dead father in the episode of Ulysses set in the National Library:—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and ...”

“... a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an uneasiness about dealing with others who might doubt his unerring rectitude. The only well-known anecdotes about his bland life of acquiring wealth are both cruel: leading a pack of bullies at his prep school, personally cutting off the ...”

“... us in her extraordinary book, In Search of the Phoenicians: ‘They did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or “people”.’ Quinn’s central claim – that the concept of ‘Phoenician’ identity has for nearly three millennia been imposed from outside – is not as controversial as it may sound. Historians of the Levant and North Africa ...”

“... encounters a man who looks like her dead father sitting on the floor of an empty room. Her child self is sometimes able to approach him, leaning her weight on him so that he topples over. On other nights she senses ‘warmth and softness’ coming from him, but when he begins to turn his head towards her, she starts and wakes in terror. It is, she ...”

“... first ten years of settlement.’ In another class, students were learning about the idea of the self-made man. The exemplar was Frederick Douglass. One student declared that the American Dream was a Cold War invention. Each gave a presentation on the self-made person of his or her choosing. Two chose Cristiano ...”

“... classic republican tradition with clear judgment and political propriety. But the privileges of self-elected relocation and its attendant philosophic calm have been sparingly distributed in the history of those displaced persons for whom one should properly reserve the word exile. Aihwa Ong describes ‘flexible citizenship’ as open only to an ...”

“... to understand how I can have been so popular in Marseille as here I am my usual stiff and self-conscious self. I have tried to explain that circumstances had a great deal to do with it.’ Marino argues that the work of the Emergency Rescue Committee permanently altered the cultural balance between Europe and ...”

“... celestial beauty. And it was empty, as provincial places in those days were. I see my 17-year-old self roaming unrestricted through the colleges as one could in those unfranchised days, standing in Trinity Great Court in the moonlight thinking it inconceivable I could ever come to study in such blessed surroundings. And nor could I so far as Trinity was ...”

“... admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson. Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life he went to a luxurious health farm – his favoured establishment was Champneys – to lose a few pounds. The regime also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of ...”

“... halted between green mountains and blue sea … He writes to anyone, he calls nobody, to his own self he writes, in himself forgets, and is redeemed, becoming again me[*] There is no question of automatic writing here or even of Romantic inspiration, but those ghosts of literary otherness never quite go away. In this early work – written in the 1940s ...”

“... praised through me, the more limited the female intellect is believed to be.’ No doubt the self-deprecation is mostly literary convention, but it feels a long way from crushing flint with teeth. And what do either of those women share with Moderata Fonte in 16th-century Venice, whose chatty polemic on The Worth of Women is subtitled ‘Wherein is ...”

“... The rhetoric of both men seems to be shot through with plaintive rural nostalgia for the small, self-contained life of the village; for a world where ‘frontline services’ are ‘delivered’ from within the community by the church, the WI and the Over Sixties Club, where no one dies unnoticed by his neighbours, the pub serves as a nightly local ...”