“... and beat them senseless. The cultivated one was Philip’s Russian-descended mother, Ida, a self-improving, self-educated enemy of the three Ks of domesticated womanhood – Küche, Kirche, Kinder – who would dispatch her children to long summer camps and go off on part-time degree courses on her own. She wasn’t a ...”

“... where ‘if you’d showered you had a competitive edge.’ Romy is presented as an autodidact, a self-taught reader of library books. She didn’t fall completely into drug addiction like some of her friends but neither did she escape the nihilism that prevents her from joining ‘the straight world’. The Mars Room is her purgatory. She loves heroin, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In​ 1903, W.C. Handy, the self-proclaimed ‘father of the blues’, was touring Mississippi with his band, the Colored Knights of Pythias, when he fell asleep at a railway station in Tutwiler, just south of Clarksdale, waiting for a long-delayed train. As he recorded in his autobiography, he woke with a start to hear the blues for the first time: A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar next to me while I slept ...”

“... wrote (in a piece in the London Magazine in 1979) that Quin ‘was not one of those authors who self-consciously strove to be an innovator, rather she had to seek a different form for each theme which occupied her mind’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first reading her novels, the people I knew who liked that kind of thing were mostly ...”

“... enough for McEwan to enjoy making knowing jokes at its expense: Charlie recalls his 17-year-old self discovering literature, ‘taking an interest in imaginary people. Heller’s Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High Bouncing Lover, Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well that Ends Well’ – book titles which were all discarded early by ...”

“... department at Transport House, she felt ready for it. ‘Life at the mine had made me strong and self-reliant. I felt sure I could cope with misogynistic politicians and, indeed, with the snakes that one finds hidden in all political parties.’ Hosking – who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold ...”

“... the reform movement refused to acknowledge the enormous importance of footbinding in the self-image of older Chinese women. For generations, not to have bound feet was to risk unmarriageability and social ostracism. ‘I pity you so, you ignorant women,’ Yan Xishan thundered. ‘Hurry up and get rid of your old bad habits, don’t let my concern ...”

“... in winter the refuge is ‘a great white nothing’. These are very ugly stories, but in their self-interest, corrupt dealing, and dismissal of social or welfare concerns, Bush’s women are no different from Bush’s men. The corporate entanglements of Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush himself are well documented. The American government works for big ...”

“... thought-patterns predicated on notions of order, balance and discipline. His behaviour may seem self-pitying and his demeanour lumbering, but he is fundamentally a decent person and very rarely a dishonest one, as the evidence collected here demonstrates. The pomposity of his addresses to the mirror may grate on Anglo-Saxon ears: ‘Of course Cubism ...”

“... internally coherent overall structure of such dispositions – a single, integrated personality or self – across the course of a lifetime. So someone who performs actions that are in accordance with nature in some contexts but not others, or who feels indifferent about some indifferents but not all, or who is in any way prone to find that some aspects of his ...”

“... nearly human. Loving a man is not sainthood, but Smart showed how far a person could go towards self-immolation – all that distance, all those years – simply to avoid devaluing their own capacity for love. Trying to cope and trying to write are not usually twins in the mind of the male writer. But for Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf they are the ...”

“... too large a share in it. Ethical standards, he maintains, were designed not merely to supply the self-esteem of professional respectability, which might seem explanation enough, but to assure purchasers that the books they bought were what they purported to be. The ethics were not simply business ones, for there was a ‘bond between domestic and ...”

“... judgment; the Wealth of Nations, on the other hand, portrays us as beings motivated largely by self-interest. To generations of scholars this sharp contrast between the sympathetic and the selfish conjured up a hermeneutic abyss. Various strategies were employed to bridge it. Had Smith’s readers confounded prescription with description, a humanistic ...”

“... was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of self-belief. Paradoxically, it was those who might be accused of not understanding art who would nourish it, unknowingly, through this delicate moment, setting up a concomitance between its life and theirs. It was as if their lives were destined, in some ...”