“... against the housing market at its height. They make good characters themselves: Kahneman – self-effacing, insecure and moody (‘like Woody Allen,’ as one colleague put it, ‘without the humour’) – grew up in Vichy France, in hiding. His father, a chemist, had been saved from deportation to a concentration camp by the intervention of his ...”

“... One​  of the puzzling things about feminism is that it can be confused with being self-centred. If it’s good for me, a woman might say of something she wants to do – whether it’s Botox injections, running a country, writing a book or being chronically late – then it’s good for feminism! Sometimes this sort of reasoning is a necessary release; sometimes it’s a joke (on men at first, even if eventually it rebounds on women); sometimes feminism gets stuck there for a time ...”

“... remaining as jolly and animated as a ventriloquist’s puppet.’ As a child, full of anger and self-loathing, Jesse attempted his own ritual of erasure: taking a Brillo pad to his skin, he ‘put the hot tap on until it ran scalding and set to scratching off the black’.Jesse’s adolescence coincides with the rise of rap and R&B. Suddenly his skin colour ...”

“... There’s Molly Zane, an Australian nurse with a ‘marvellously uncivil swagger’ whose self-assurance marks her as an outsider in the west of Ireland. Then there are Sinéad’s fellow patients. There’s ‘Shane-no-one-caught-a-surname’, with all the charisma that moniker suggests (though to be fair he’s mostly unconscious); Patrick Hegarty ...”

“... the Clutter Image Rating (2008), a diagnostic tool designed by Frost and Steketee to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure. The CIR consists of images of different interiors – kitchen, bedroom, living room – which are progressively filled with objects. In the first picture of the living room the space is more or less ...”

“... when it is mentioned, Catholicism serves as a context for intellectual rather than spiritual self-examination. Ernst Untzinger, an EC bureaucrat of uncertain sexuality, ponders his own compulsive materialism and laments the fact that even when he visits the Pope he can’t help calculating his worldly riches (‘life-proprietor of the Sistine ...”

“... consider somewhat privileged, somewhat arcane. Thus Lord Eccles is described as ‘opinionated, self-assured, a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’. Even if you find this account over-subtle you will still grasp that its subject is a very different sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural ...”

“... in revolutions ... During the physical struggle when singleness of eye and magnetism, devotion and self-sacrifice were needed, Abdullah would be too complex for a single purpose.’ Faisal could be run. Abdullah could not. Put aside the maundering downstage self-pity of the passage on Faisal and one sees a manipulator ...”

“... where Emma is a dilettante; socially and economically trapped where Emma is at large; Romantic and self-thwarted in her emotional life where Emma is carefree and self-indulged. However pointed and suggestive this contrast may be, it does not imply equivalence. Jane is outshone by Emma (so is the other Jane, Jane Bennett, by ...”

“... hardly ever recognised. Shafarevich’s nationalism is both an attempt to raise dwindling Russian self-esteem (as the patently faltering economy further belies the regime’s claims to socialism and to relative economic advancement) and a specific, intellectual response to the ‘cult’ of Jewish emigration, the ‘apotheosis of flight’, the tendency, as ...”

“... speculating about the nature of society as making positive suggestions for its improvement. The self-contradictions and simultaneous embracing of conflicting viewpoints that served him so well in other fields were not what was wanted here. Anyone whose acquaintance with him was confined to the material made available to us in Mason and Wokler’s Political ...”

“... out of everything we can’t or wont know about ourselves. But then Dracula is a dream, multiple, self-contradicting, hovering. He doesn’t show up in mirrors because he is himself a mirror, ready to reflect a whole hodgepodge of fears and desires. He drinks blood, preys on women; converts men to insect-eaters; he is the undead, a travesty of the ...”

“... recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable. There are certainly striking ...”

“... element of wish-fulfilment can have some disturbing effects, as Paul Williams revealed in a candid self-analysis: ‘There’s a terrible thing that happens ... I find that the better the performance – you know when Dylan, when I was like, sitting in the audience in Berkeley in’86 – Dylan’s doing “Lenny Bruce” and I’m thinking “God! this is ...”

“... of the sort: ‘I, a Cretan, assert that all Cretans are liars.’ Deconstructive propositions are self-falsifying because they are presented in natural language; they are, moreover, not a stimulating mental game but a soul-destroying heresy. Real Presences traces this subversion of language and faith to the period between 1870 and 1930. Before that was ...”