“... heard a shaheed’s parent say, in private, “I am happy” or even “I am proud.”’ Self-selecting groups who decide what is sacred and what is not are often at odds with the communities from which they’re drawn. Atran has spoken to sources in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, where Islamist movements enjoy broad support, but he’s only ...”

“... an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist superficially the opposite of the novelist we’ve come to know. The eerily blank and neutral creations of Jed Martin imply a placid acceptance ...”

“... and places few aristocrats would encounter on their Continental tours. He was chancy, observant, self-assured, kind to horses and rude to people. Hammond was born in Cambridgeshire in 1748 and grew up in a little village called Exning near Newmarket. By the time he was six he had lost his mother and three brothers; his father, penniless and out of ...”

“... flight was, in its way, a tribute to the role she had played in the household and a subconscious self-indictment. Years later he returned, but it was too late. They didn’t need him any more. The boys had been taken in by an aunt and the girl had gone to live with her grandmother. Of the boys, Satyam was cleverer, a dreamer whose discovery of modern Telugu ...”

“... poetry which similarly reveals this gift for being wrapped up in itself: he called it the ‘self-inwoven simile’, and it happened, Empson said, ‘when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough he compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature, or that it sustains itself by ...”

“... puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse.Weather is made up of self-contained paragraphs like the following, which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings ...”

“... sweater; the other sports a similar ensemble in soft orange. In a cosmology so strongly based on self-presentation and personal style, it was always on the cards that the devil would wear Primark. Is it cheeky to describe this very us-and-them worldview, minimising or discounting tensions within and between minorities, as rather binary?It’s overstating the ...”

“... their views, especially when it might be read as a declaration of faith. I always cringe at the self-importance of the genre: though open letters can sometimes exert influence, stiffly worded exhortations hardly suffice to stop states, militaries, bombs. And yet, a ‘no open letters’ policy can serve as a convenient excuse when one is hesitant to stand ...”

“... of any delicacy.’ Nearly half a century later, he reprinted this passage in his book Sixteen Self Sketches and added: ‘When I wrote this in 1901, I did not believe that an author so utterly void of delicacy as Sigmund Freud could not only come into human existence, but become as famous and even instructive by his defect as a blind man might by writing ...”

“... new advertising venues, like Mademoiselle, one of the postwar places devoted to a new sort of self-making. Capote did not reflect a generation, as Fitzgerald had done, or seek to scrub the world new with carbolic silences, like Ernest Hemingway, or to turn things upside down, like James Baldwin. His political triumphs would be in the manner of his small ...”

“... a madhouse cell in an attempt to make contact with a sympathetic reader, Castel is agonised by self-rebuke: ‘It was I who killed you, I, who saw you mute and anxious, but could not touch you through the wall of glass. I, so stupid, so blind, so incredibly selfish and cruel!’ His inability to sustain a settled union with someone else is naturally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in modern fashion, about which Rawsthorn’s book is fairly rudimentary, conventional and often self-contradictory, but of the modern fashion business, its development, its operations, its force, and their effects on the public and on its own personnel. Yves St Laurent is the name of a designer, and also of an international, multi-million-dollar fashion ...”

“... 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 ...”