“... great advantage of The Same and Not the Same is that it seems unlikely to create a readership of self-made men who believe they have original ideas, after reading one or two popular essays. The book points out that to acquire the simplest possible view of a carbon atom or molecule takes some ten years, not only of learning, listening and reading, but also of ...”

“... Easy’ is a woman writer’s fantasy of the zipless book, of the writing that comes from feminine self-indulgence, from doing exactly what you want. Words flow from the female body like blood or milk, and men come to serve and worship, not to censor. The body is timeless, maternal, a cradle of imagination which makes writing play. These flattering images of ...”

“... shows that these Gypsy-fanciers and lore-collectors were a tribe as eccentric, exclusive and self-regarding as any other. In addition to the usual scholarly disputes – the Rai fell out with his friend Bernard Gilliat-Smith over the aspirated c in Balkan Romani – there was rivalry over gaining the Gypsies’ confidence and in the open-air excitement ...”

“... is inhabited by many shameless hucksters who, to put the matter plainly, are unlearned, confused, self-indulgent, false, childish, suffer from illusions of grandeur and don’t write too good. Which, to be fair, doesn’t distinguish them from many of their colleagues down the hall. But the harm they do is real and appalling – less because they transform ...”

“... addicts in case she, too, comes under their spell. Anna Pavord has no such reservations: she is a self-confessed tulipomaniac. ‘There must be one or two people in the world that choose not to like tulips,’ she remarks disdainfully, ‘but such an aberration is barely credible.’ Why people avoid some plants and revere others is the subject of Frederick ...”

“... of America. She was shocked by the ‘overabundance of everything’ and the ‘complete self-confidence of individuals’. She told her brother and sister that most of New England is ‘wasted’. ‘It makes nonsense,’ she added, ‘of all the world-planning talk about cultivating the desert and the jungle – all they have to do is to cultivate ...”

“... most of it, a broken string. These extras undermine or spook what is otherwise a portrait of two self-satisfied young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied ...”

“... that alternative: an alternative which might be Britain’s – open, dynamic, entrepreneurial, self-confident, rich. When Blair went to America after 11 September he left his heart in Washington. He recently told the House of Commons that the alliance with the United States was a matter of faith; and I cannot think of another of our ‘allies’ for whom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... smile and considerable charm . . . He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket.’ In the Sudan in 1936 he still wore a white sweater with the Old Etonian colours. Later yet, he voted Liberal because Jo Grimond was an Old Etonian. The school gave him a taste for ...”

“... 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 ...”