“... Each has a different experience of colonialism, a different narrative of independence, a different self-image; accordingly, the epidemic has been viewed differently, tackled differently. Her well-organised book is practical, concrete and full of hard information, but it lacks nothing in subtlety; she is conscious of the ambivalence and complexity that hedge ...”

“... the issue of the paranormal is vulnerable, both to accusations of crankiness and to a sort of self-disgust about the sensationalism involved; and it is hard to sift out an acceptable truth, given the human tendency to confabulate, the fallibility of memory, the wide scope for interpretation, and the prejudice which invests the whole subject. As a good ...”

“... to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.In these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The ...”

“... blame it on the EU, and begin storytelling. Abstract principles such as the right to cultural self-determination for minority peoples are there to lend lustre to your defence of your own people, not to help you identify the complaints of your people with the complaints of others, because that’s what they are: others. The Brexiteers’ opponents, the ...”

“... engagement with their precursors. By ‘great labour’ Eliot appears to have in mind intense self-directed study, such as Milton’s five-year ‘studious retirement’ in his twenties. The goal Eliot envisions is to absorb your precursors so thoroughly that they speak in and through your work. This is not ...”

“... any form of writing does. For thousands of years we have used writing to extend the reach of the self through seals, spells, inscriptions, letters, books and pamphlets. In the case of bots modelled on real individuals, might they not wield some diluted form of that individual’s authority? Letters and contracts already perform this function, while the ...”

“... a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs Richard Dalloway. It is Peter who has held her feet most relentlessly to the fire, and now he’s back in London after three decades as a colonial administrator in India, mannerisms intact – notably the habit ...”

“... model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet ...”

“... was preoccupied by the need to earn a living for his growing family while persisting with his self-analysis. The year after Anna’s birth his father died and he used the word ‘psychoanalysis’ for the first time in print (in French). These were years of real and necessary self-absorption for Freud. Mrs Freud’s ...”

“... revealed to be ‘mere machines’. Many others have claimed that we must drastically revise our self-image now that we have realised that we are just Turing machines made out of protoplasm. Dennett’s claim is that, thanks in part to the development of parallel distributed processing, a way of programming computers which ‘blazes the first remotely ...”

“... render belated homage, and I will never forgive myself for this failure.’ The tone is not just self-abasing (‘I quail before de Gaulle. He is the Great Other, the inaccessible absolute’ etc), but self-flagellating. What Debray can’t get over is that for most of his life ‘De Gaulle just made us snigger’: he was ...”

“... the pubs and prostitutes and streets, the flotsam of the great dense city. Nothing is on show, or self-consciously revealed. As Holroyd says, the appalling monster-bores of Hamilton’s pub, the Midnight Bell (which is also the title of the trilogy’s first volume), ‘divert us by driving the other characters to distraction’, as they pursue their inanely ...”

“... many Bengalis live and work was too much for one resident of Princelet Street. Charles Clover, self-declared yuppie and environment correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, hit back in the Spectator (11 July 1987). Spitalfields is altogether more dynamic and enterprising than the sullen and uniform slums that exist where the welfare state got ...”

“... behaviour – cynical, baffled or plain incompetent – of the collection of Oxford graduates and self-made men who sat in its Cabinets. The Party, one might conclude, survived because it gave its poorer supporters just enough, and presented a humanitarian and liberationist face to middle-class campaigners. ‘The Government,’ Ponting points out, ‘had a ...”

“... concierge. Not Chester’s fault who has behaved wonderfully, but just the sufferings of the self-sufficient schizophrenic caught at last. I never really loved anyone before, and then when he got through the wall, he became so much part of my life that I keep forgetting that he is a separate person, and having discovered love, I have also discovered what ...”