“... MotoringTom PaulinOr Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to tracethe Burma Campaign the war woundelocution lessons All Soulsthe office it’s a long way from Co ...”

“... art, Sipping at a spoonful of yoghurt And smiling at our smiles, described his dancing Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads (But only God, he said, can create a language). Journalists proffered, on platters of silence, Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –  ... At a giddy moment – To the belly-dancer, the ...”

“... Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands here, at this window, gazing out, not me who woke up late, when everyone had gone to work or school, but someone else, a man so like myself that nobody would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth – but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely register in words, unless I call it graceful and nomadic, some lost art of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight, the feel of distance singing in the flesh, that happiness-as-forage, bedding in, declining, making sense of what it finds ...”

“... Designated Mourner, a play about love, blood, pajamas, the current police state and the passionate self-love of each of us. Wally, sitting very still once at the beginning and once at the end, sets a cocktail napkin on fire. It flames out like Moses then goes lilting up and away into ash. Ash is astounding. Made out of death yet sort of offhand. Wally’s play ...”

“... loudly debated Visconti and Bergman, while the latter stared at the snow and shared booze, smoking self-rolled cigs and spitting. Every member of the Union was entitled to invite one adult guest. One evening, in late December 1980, just a few days before New Year’s Eve, my friend Liuba, a young animator artist, called to remind me to bring my passport to ...”

“... on what she called ‘legal medicine’, though she ‘found that no one, including alas! my own self, knew exactly what legal medicine was supposed to mean’. She proceeded intuitively, from a conviction that more violent crimes would be solved if only policemen were more observant at crime scenes (she was a great reader of Sherlock Holmes). The ...”

“... of the Fairies draped adoringly round his stupidity, in a way that the character’s own refined self would have been shocked by if he could ever have conceived it, but which the poet’s own even more refined self saw as a good, human (which is, creaturely) truth about love.I don’t want to work through all the ...”

“... affliction of her deare Husband, & all her Relations; but of none in this world more than my self, who lost the most excellent, & most estimable friend, that ever liv’d: I cannot but say my very Soule was united to hers, & that this stroake did peirce me to the utmost depth.’ During the years in which Evelyn saw Margaret most frequently the diary is ...”

“... books division of Random House. She attributed her career advances to Steinberg’s coaching in self-assertiveness, but explained that she had lost her job because of him as well. He threw out manuscripts she brought home from the office. Her black eyes and broken bones could not have helped much at work, nor could the steady diet of cocaine Joel ...”

“... without a moment’s hesitation. The first, of course, is Dr Owen himself, whose absence of self-doubt is almost as awesome as Mrs Thatcher’s. The other, I am left to assume, is the wholly admirable Debbie Owen, who personifies (and I am quite serious here) all three of the Platonic virtues of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. One of the redeeming features ...”

“... even of the best art. As Philip Kerr has perceived, and embodied in his choice of extracts, a self-consciousness about truth goes with scepticism about it to produce the modern science of propaganda. Truth is the first casualty in war, whether hot or cold; when Churchill remarked that truth in wartime was ‘so precious that she should always be attended ...”

“... Instead, they have become an underclass trapped in ghettos which (in Lemann’s words) their ‘self-destructive behaviour ... drug use, out-of-wedlock childbearing, dropping out of school’ have turned into ‘among the worst places to live in the world’. What went wrong? It certainly wasn’t that American blacks lacked ...”

“... for thinking they can achieve it when so many others have failed are swathed in obscurity and self-deception. Adrian Oldfield’s eloquent evocation of the civic republican tradition and Jonathan Boswell’s path-breaking analysis of the links between the values of community and the imperatives of an advanced economy should be read against this ...”

“... idea of Modernism encourages us to think of experiment, not as a constant focus of creativity and self-assertion throughout history, but as the product of a specific (if undefinable) historical crisis. No doubt such ideas have themselves been a focus of creativity and self-assertion throughout history. But some commentators ...”

“... some ways as politically immature as himself felt the need to look to the Ascendancy class for the self-confidence and social prestige available from no other source. Parnell came not only from a governing élite but from a family which had played a leading role in the assertion of Irish, if principally Protestant, nationality in the days of the ...”