“... Now it’s our mother’s link to life, her thread to safety from the labyrinth of the self. When it stops talking on the mantelshelf, that silence of significance will spread even to the newsless circles of our dead. The Fairy Flag I The fairy flag is in a frame like a picture white on white, like a fine tablecloth or shoulder-wrap too good to ...”

“... home, with his older sister and her husband and children. ‘At home he was his usual brusque self,’ his friend and fellow novelist Natalia Ginzburg, Leone’s wife, remembered. ‘He acted like a kid or an outsider.’ Most of his time he spent in his room. To pay the bills Pavese began to translate, producing stylish versions of such complex works as ...”

“... embedding her book in her political activism and youthful reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s self-loathing (or at best ambivalent) book about being old, La Vieillesse. Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable ...”

“... year of life as a non-blind, otherwise healthy person is worth 1 Qaly. (These numbers are based on self-reporting by Aids patients and blind people, which raises some obvious worries. For example, dialysis patients rate their lives at 0.56 Qalys – significantly higher than the 0.39 Qalys predicted by people who don’t need dialysis. Maybe this is because ...”

“... the message,’ he wrote, ‘the message is there is no message.’ Holmes wrote screeds of self-doubt masquerading as higher purpose, hunting for a vision of human worth. (He was on Sertraline, brandname Zoloft.) ‘Why does the value of a person ever matter?’ he wrote. He drew lines of matchstick men lying on their sides (‘Value = 0’). He noted ...”

“... thought also to be the addressee of Catullus’ amorous poetry. The speech, Pro Caelio, takes a self-consciously light-hearted tone in what was a very serious trial, but the playfulness has a malicious intent: noble Clodia is treated as a common prostitute and her brother as her equal and indeed partner in debauchery. By now Clodius was being challenged on ...”

“... never one to avoid a stand-up row about points of principle. Plenty of Protestants rejoice in a self-consciously Lutheran tradition, especially Germans and Scandinavians, and they will be the ones most readily celebrating 1517, remembering 31 October as Reformation Day, a big annual event in Lutheran Germany. Very many Lutherans of German and Scandinavian ...”

“... its own”’. In Lear’s hands, the word calls up something occluded yet vital, allows self-knowledge and self-estrangement to go together; by behaving nonsensically, the human animal may get closer to becoming what he is. Lear once wrote of ‘the sense of the absurd so nearly akin to shame, on which you are ...”

“... is easy to read and enjoy, the experimenter is a hack’). But he does agree, to judge by his self-awarded grades, with the notion of a serious (if temporary) falling-off after Slaughterhouse 5, starling with Breakfast of Champions and reaching its nadir with Slaptick. D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it ...”

“... job’ at all, let alone have to add ‘money’, as if ‘economic’ was unclear. Note, too, the self-pity (‘staff hurts’ and ‘hard ones’) and concomitant self-glorification: para 4 is supposed to have ‘you’ as the subject but by 4(c) this has irresistibly been turned around. Nixon, it seems, felt good telling ...”

“... an aging prodigy, the Mozart of celluloid, putting himself and his troupe through the hoops with self-conscious bravado. He irradiated the entire project with a glancing mockery that might have reminded a bookish provincial lad of Don Juan or the Dunciad, but of nothing he had previously encountered, or expected, in the cinema. At least where I lived, these ...”

“... and political lapses, and sometimes drew an angry protest from his victims; the formality and self-evident marginality of verse allowed him to enjoy the role of irritant. But it was not until he settled in London in 1889, and assimilated the rhythms and the fatalistic bravado of music-hall songs, that he began writing poems which claim to represent, to ...”

“... philosophers typically do in the absence of a command of the facts: I can ask what such a self-understanding might look like, and I can do that in the guise of asking myself what I would mean if I claimed that there is a history of the human being to which we are blinded by the traditional histories of flashing, dramatic events.’ Cavell’s concern ...”

“... has the dreamlike quality of introspective monologue – a genre which is hardly ever free from self-absorption and self-indulgence. But he has always been on the move, and in the literary sense too. At the beginning of his career as a writer he was associated with the famous ‘Gruppe 47’ to which German literature ...”

“... and sustained, as well as thwarted or jeopardised, between men and women who don’t read self-help books – just the kind who might want or need grown-up novels of love. Here is the female narrator of Mating, a graduate student in anthropology called Karen Ann (as we learn when we glimpse her as a married woman in Mortals), describing her future ...”