“... than anything I could achieve at school with words. There were no excuses, no justifications, no self-deprecations: it was less equivocal, more final. I took for a while to reading about chess, along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a ...”

“... his life could not be anything more than a compendium of abstract ideas. But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his ...”

“... is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place ...”

“... that she lacked not only the ruthlessness needed to make it to the top but also the boundless self-confidence and (for much of her career) the supportive spouse that a woman in a man’s world needs. Peel agrees, but he also rather gently notes her limitations – difficulty prioritising, lack of political nous – as a minister and as a party ...”

“... of constitutional meaning are as old and as august as the founding itself. And the theoretical self-consciousness Scalia brings to the table is a 20th-century phenomenon. In fact, he often sounds like a comparative literature student c.1983. He says it’s a ‘sad commentary’ that ‘American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most’ and ...”

“... that has more successfully brought historical and literary insights together. If Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The ...”

“... eye – and I immediately saw that he was talking about himself as much as me, about the younger self he had been when he moved north. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘Really. You can’t live here in splendid isolation. You may think you want that, but you don’t. You’d go mad in the end, believe me.’ He turned back to the ...”

“... master, two conditions must in turn be satisfied. You must first of all succeed in mastering your self. By this Milton means that you must be able to control your passions and act in accordance with the dictates of reason at all times. If you instead allow yourself, as he puts it at the beginning of The Tenure, to be governed by blind affections, then your ...”

“... been suicidal (he claimed his last jump would be without a harness, or was that just an artist’s self-promotion?) and he dies in the end of unrelated natural causes (a heart condition) somewhere near Saginaw, Michigan, deep in the heart of the country. (Saginaw: the place Paul Simon’s protagonist hitchhikes from when he goes ‘to look for ...”

“... has edited herself into the story: she is looking out at her father and infant brother, her unborn self, the pregnant mother. A corporeal ghost, back from the future, eavesdropping on that captured scene, the group on the grass. While some unknown photographer presses the shutter. What is intriguing is how she uses her technique, the layering, the rubbing ...”

“... of some collective ‘illusion’ that would provide its people with a sense of purpose and mutual self-esteem. To give his considerations on Rome a focus, Pick follows the story of the man who, in the decades following Leopardi’s death, sought to promote an ‘illusion’ of the sort the poet had prescribed: in speech after speech from the balconies of ...”

“... of the portrayal of Kiarostami as an auteur. What he seems to admire most about him is his self-effacement. He praises the ‘ingenuous eye of his camera’ for stripping away cultural constructions and quietly enabling us to see the ‘nakedness of reality’. Kiarostami ‘became the Iranian post-Revolutionary film-maker par excellence’, Dabashi ...”

“... of work on the Concerto for two pianos. On the way he takes in Stravinsky’s astonishing self-creation with The Firebird ballet, written when he was 27 (there had been little indication of his genius before that), the revolutionary achievement of the subsequent Diaghilev ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; the vivid transformation of Russian ...”

“... American corporations who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering ...”

“... the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater ...”