“... 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 ...”

“... unconnected; the honeymooners’ prospects don’t look good. Tarquin himself, necessarily, is not self-consciously grotesque: he is oblivious to both his absurdity and his barbarity – two of the characteristics he most deplores in others. The novel is a sustained, virtuoso exercise in dramatic irony. At times it’s so deadpan that the reader is in danger ...”

“... vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years ...”

“... professionalise their operation. The army had far greater firepower than the police; the narcos’ self-defence strategies would have to be more sophisticated. Money wasn’t the problem: the production, export and import of drugs generates more than enough to arm a criminal gang, and it would be no trouble at all to pay higher salaries than the Mexican army ...”

“... Earls Court, and a legal action brought by Finlay against Fulcrum Press had triggered a savage and self-inflicted defeat for the progressive side. One notable antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was ...”

“... Lexicon (Pangaean is a universal language, à la Esperanto). The Teleportation Accident has the self-help book Dames! and How to Lay Them: Want to impress a dame the morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she’s still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That’s one of every type of egg on a ...”