“... the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong clues to the meaning of the author’s own? That question has been ...”

“... would come to know, over the next few months as ‘the fascination’. That sounds melodramatic, self-indulgent, but it was the word that came to mind then and as time went by it seemed more accurate than anything else. Somewhere, at the core of this terrifying paralysis and helplessness, there was a fascination, a taste, not of death, exactly, but of ...”

“... to canonisation, eventually granted by Pope Alexander III in 1161. There was a strong element of self-interest in the process, designed to promote the status of Westminster Abbey, Edward’s foundation and burial place, but there is more to be said about the speed and means by which the Edward of recent history ‘faded into the image of a saint’.The real ...”

“... of the moment by retreating into a monkish solitude, or searching for authenticity in the self-mythologising self-care movement. Emira does both. She longs to work with her hands, as her family does: her dad is a beekeeper, her mum binds books, her little brother is an award-winning barista and her sister is a ...”

“... too stupidly obvious and so on). That adjustment needs to happen in a secret space, with the ego, self-loving or self-hating, tied up safely elsewhere. Trying to write like a Genius, any writer might feel an awful fraud. Howland’s thwarted career is our loss: at her best she is very good. Most of the stories in the first ...”

“... complacently celebrating Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, we should be trying to understand why self-declared anti-liberals succeeded in the first place, and in what ways their politics might endure even if they lose at the polls.In The New Politics of Poland Jarosław Kuisz offers a competent and well-written account of the larger forces at work in PiS’s ...”

“... to represent themselves, albeit within the limits of the categories offered.Back in 1939, however, self-identification was not on the agenda. Instead, the bureau created scenarios – each, Bouk says, ‘amounting almost to a short story’ – for would-be enumerators to disentangle. What was the race of a child born to a white man and a Japanese woman? Or ...”

“... Take this one, from ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, the first story in Moore’s first book, Self-Help (1985), in which Charlene is having an affair with a married man. He rings her while she’s at work: ‘Hi, this is Attila,’ he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone. Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: ‘Oh. Hi, Hun.’ It’s ...”

“... entrepreneur: manically energetic, pushing, perfectionist. He could occasionally be amusingly self-deprecating, or flamboyantly generous to staff, but only within the bounds of an imperious egotism. No one doubted that he was ‘The Chief’. He stimulated competition within his empire in the hope of making a product good enough to destroy all rivals ...”

“... crossings, Phillips travelled almost all the way along the western side of the border, and, as a self-described ‘passionate believer in the individual freedoms that the Eastern Bloc so systematically deprioritised’, his point of view is essentially a Western one. When he crosses over into what was Czechoslovakia and East Germany, for instance, he feels a ...”

“... only pretending to care to make heaps of cash? Mark Halyard is the wrong kind of people. A self-professed ‘extinction industry cunt’, the only animals he appears to care about are dogs: ‘If [they] ever went extinct – that’s totally different.’ The mining company he works for is drilling into the last known habitat of the venomous ...”

“... in confinement as both juvenile and adult, and grew up largely on the San Francisco streets with a self-taught sage called Mo as a teacher, but he can certainly turn a sentence:Mo was always muttering apocalyptic shit from the start, so it wasn’t obvious right away when it started coming more often and at a higher pitch. Especially because the words were the ...”

“... the living usually fail to understand or act on it. Perhaps the uncanniest spectre is the one that self-haunts. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ Henry James has his protagonist, Spencer Brydon, return after a long absence from his American home, only to confront his unlived self: ‘He’s none of me, even as I might have ...”

“... fundamental national rights of the Palestinian people. The document could not advance Palestinian self-determination, Said maintained, because self-determination entails freedom, sovereignty and equality.In my article I put the case for the Accord. It was obvious that the document fell a long way short of the Palestinian ...”

“... mantle has stayed on, but Stoppard dramatised the idea of facing off an authentic and an assumed self towards the end of Leopoldstadt, when two young men face each other for the first time since Kristallnacht: one is ‘a writer of funny books’ who was taken to England as a child; the other is a mathematician whose family stayed in Vienna. For one, being ...”