“... 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 ...”

“... historians use other definitions. I’m inclined to believe that ‘free labour’, understood as self-ownership, is more useful. Wage labour is a reasonable definition, however, and it helps clarify much of what was at stake in the Civil War. This precise definition of capitalism, however, coexists uneasily with their use of ‘slavery’ as a catch-all ...”

“... But if it’s not nationalism, how should we describe England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most useful descriptor is Whiggism, after Herbert Butterfield’s incisive dissection in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) of the tendency ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ...”

“... that the 30 per cent who held out had ‘better coping skills, were more socially competent, self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable and academically successful’. It’s this willingness to open up the expected format that makes Murder at Wrotham Hill so compelling about its time and the attitudes of those living in it, rather than simply a voyeuristic ...”

“... milk over soft white bread Late style here means spare fragments, scattered memories and some self-disgust. (In the US, ‘crèche’ means a Nativity scene rather than the place you drop off children.) Other new poems are lists, ‘slowly repetitiously’, as Rich admits, cataloguing reasons for outrage. She has a sense that she has said it all ...”

“... contrary to his image he spent much of his teens, twenties and early thirties on a determinedly self-improving trajectory: an apprenticeship in TV repair in Leith, then an electrical engineering course in London; clerical work for Hackney council, then a computing MSc; a successful spell as a North London property developer; then better council work back in ...”