“... matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation. The crusade against the trade and the government’s eventual response offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s ...”

“... the overcrowding there. As a result, the model housing project has been presented as a bourgeois self-delusion, all the worse for being provided by private companies offering a low but guaranteed return to investors (an exact counterpart, in fact, to today’s ‘ethical’ investments). And yet, these blocks would soon have stopped going up if nobody wanted ...”

“... two countries, Turkey and China, in chapters combining genuinely interesting information with self-indulgent asides. It’s puzzling that he doesn’t mention recent cases in which the Turkish government successfully secured the return of antiquities from several leading American museums, such as the statue of Herakles from the Museum of Fine Arts in ...”

“... thinks – that ‘the very first foundation of virtue is the endeavour to preserve the individual self.’ This may sound like an extraordinary anticipation of neo-Darwinism; but it isn’t what Spinoza said. Damasio takes the trouble to refer to the Latin of the Ethics, but gets it slightly wrong: his ‘individual ...”

“... kin. The only unfamiliar diagnosis he offers is that Africa, unlike Europe, has no tradition of self-criticism, and perhaps that is ‘why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind’. But this is doubtful: the cultural capacity for self-criticism is a splendid thing, but many parts of the world where it ...”

“... stick and run it through the corridor of wilderness. It fills a bit with water the first time. Is self-erased. The second time it does not fill. It leaves a mark where my stick ran. I make another (cursive) mark. How easily it bends to cursive, snakes towards thought. Looking back I see the birds eating the bird. The other way my gaze can barely reach ...”

“... and civilians by turns contemptuous and reluctantly admiring, his motives a painful mixture of self-interest and dutiful rigour, Prior is Barker’s most compelling creation. He is a borderline figure whose brooding, antagonistic sessions with Rivers reveal a mind so at odds with itself that at times his dissociation leads to episodes in which he doesn’t ...”

“... relationship. Both end with an ambiguous moment of transformation and a kind of dissolution of self, a breaking of bonds. Messud tells the ‘simple tale’ of Maria Poniatowski, a Ukrainian by birth, whose life in Canada begins only after a series of displacements, incarcerations and escapes. Her native village is first ‘restructured’ as a collective ...”

“... most memorable Londoners we encounter is a melancholic and affected writer called Stokes – the self-proclaimed ‘lion of literary London’. He was lying on the ottoman, swathed as profoundly as a pasha . . . His glittering pointed slippers, curling at the toes like those of some evil genius of the pantomime, were as villainous as a moustache. On his ...”

“... to my name.’ Selfhood is at the mercy of the narrative twist: the kicker is that the twisted self persists, to savour the insight and wonder what to do about it. Alban McGill, the central character in The Steep Approach to Garbadale, is another such puzzle to himself, though he has given up trying to solve it. He has turned his back on his family, the ...”

“... admitted envy of his ease at performing in these sleep experiments; on performance as such; on self-hypnosis as such; and on Surrealism’s initiatory moves. Of course, we have no way of knowing if Conley is right, whatever our initial suspicions may have been. But would it not be an act of supergenius quality to be able to assume this state when that ...”

“... the half-strategic trace of a working-class accent. Though he wouldn’t say so, it reinforces his self-respect to feel that, Prosecco notwithstanding, he remains a Dubliner ‘coarse as cabbage’. The discomfort makes sense too. It must be easier to enjoy money if you’ve made it yourself. One literary pitfall The Lemur does not altogether avoid is that of ...”

“... strategies she used to deflate the appearance of pride only made her seem bitter, overwrought and self-contradictory. Constructions of gender in antiquity have long been studied. But the subject is relatively new to Byzantine history and enables a fresh understanding of Anna’s more puzzling strategies. Modesty and seclusion remained central to the feminine ...”

“... talk about your work and not your life, if you don’t mind. ‘Bob’s patrician manner was self-created,’ Jonathan Galassi told me, ‘deliberately low-key, warm yet self-protective.’ The thing was to keep moving forward and not look back. Even at Barbara Epstein’s wake, held in her apartment on West 67th ...”

“... struck anew by the many excellent qualities of Ross Raisin’s new book. The school of writerly self-absorption has given us much fine fiction, or semi-fiction, in recent years. But it can create a strong thirst for the opposite tendency: for novels that take you somewhere you haven’t been before, that create an enclosed, distinctive world of their ...”