“... about Pompey and Caesar.’ It’s easy to forget, because we know what happened next, but also self-evidently true, as we know from our own experience: however horrifying the political catastrophe unfolding around us, we still devote ourselves primarily to the interpersonal and institutional jostling of our own little lives. So it was at Rome, and in those ...”

“... sophisticated, eventually becoming more real than the man. Like all writers, Rushdie had a shadow self, and had to deal with people confusing him with his creations, but the shadow remained a function of the self. The fatwa severed the shadow from the man. It travelled all over the world, terrorised people and entrenched ...”

“... human nature and contrived political systems that aimed no higher than the accommodation of sordid self-interest. A curious problem arises here for American conservatives: the American constitution, whose checks and balances were designed so that competing interests counteracted one another, derives from this stunted vision of humanity. How can patriotic ...”

“... but it is necessary candour ‘to own that heroes and heroines are often the vessels of our most self-flattering illusions.’ She has gone carefully into the setting of events; some readers may wish for a rather fuller introduction to the Hundred Years War and what it was about, but there is a chronological table to assist their memories. Speaking of ...”

“... superciliousness, aggressive insecurity. In his relations with fellow scholars he was cavalier and self-serving, chary of giving other workers their due except by way of blame. When, 70-years-old and in ill health, he was faced with the gravest crisis in his career, he was exceedingly vulnerable to attack, the more so because his considerable powers as a ...”

“... be separated from his distaste for the mores of ‘Western’ Jews, itself a part of that deeply self-destructive mode from which he fashioned some of his most memorable images and scenes. The manner in which the central characters of his stories – Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’, Josef K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle – are related to the ...”

“... ends. The evidence which survives those long dead usually leaves their buried lives guarded by the self-composure of letters: this intelligent novelist, pursuing the intimacy of relations between inner and outer selves, works out from the psychological freedom of insight which is her privilege, to incorporate the formally-determined behaviour, the strict ...”

“... claim that the Holocaust had been tailored to the ‘true’ underlying preferences of Jews for self-destruction). But the sense in which utility is made observable by this method is a rather weak one. This could be seen as the result of unnecessarily restricting (to choice behaviour) the range of evidence that is relevant to establishing what people’s ...”

“... as if they were people he knew, noting Whitman’s ‘good humour’, Joyce’s ‘tireless self-regard’, Edmund Wilson’s ‘dogged honesty’. In a coy foreword, he pretends to be diffident about his criticism (‘Another book. Another slain forest’), and sets himself up as an amateur, dabbling in criticism to pay his alimony. But for all his ...”

“... the first eight decades, when it did so openly, but also afterwards, less openly and perhaps less self-consciously. Since 1947, the Indian state, hungry for big power status, has adhered more aggressively to the Euro-American, global, apparently perennial model of statecraft. Nehru’s part in this was crucial. He belonged to that section of the freedom ...”

“... in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his verse. All in all, nobody is nowadays likely to complain much if we speak of the Sitwells as curious ...”

“... relationship with Jean to the comparative method of moving beyond the limitations of one’s own self-observation. E’en as the munelicht’s borrowed frae the sun I ha’e my knowledge o’ mysel’ frae thee, And much that nane but thee can e’er mak clear, Save my licht’s frae the source, is dark to me. Where Davie is surprisingly weak is on ...”

“... to devise poses. One may also feel that there is something ‘stagey’ about some of his early self-portraits and about some of his early action-filled paintings such as the Belshazzar’s Feast in the National Gallery. It is, however, hard to believe that this was intended. And anything less like a ‘studio event’ than the Woman taken in Adultery or ...”

“... trick, in which she appeals for help after she has derailed her chain with her own hands or self-inflicted a puncture. Foreign experience is also helpful in other ways. Meeting a migrant from Swat, she introduces herself as a friend of the late Wali. Trying to win over truculent Rastafarians, she produces photographs of herself in Ethiopia with Haile ...”

“... bespeaks a certain good opinion of oneself, hope to catch him in a posture of arrogance or self-importance, but O’Brien is far too fly for that. So he appears to one and all as a sort of pirate battleship, mounting heavy guns but belonging to no Navy and dangerously liable to sink anything he comes across. He attracted the nickname ‘The ...”