“... in its revealed truths. Theory can be good for historians, and few of us practise the perfectly self-abnegating primary research prescribed by Geoffrey Elton. We need something larger to help us move from the specific to the general, and towards some approximation of meaning. Acton presents his task reasonably, challenging readers to use classical ...”

“... as their murderers could manage to lay their hands on. Thereafter Bassani has the tact and self-confidence to say little more of the fate that awaits his people, though we are later shown the various ways in which the malice and greed of some of the locals, and the fear felt by others, combine bit by bit to isolate the city’s Jews from their former ...”

“... 12-step path to recovery. Hannah is nobody’s saviour, least of all her own. And yet her lack of self-righteousness, together with her wit, is her saving grace: she knows she is no better than she is, and doesn’t try to hide it – at least, not from the reader, or from Robert. She is, in this and every other way, the opposite of her ...”

“... bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less self-consciously lugubrious. A Touch of Love is harder to defend from a strictly avant-garde point of view. Using a broadly naturalistic idiom, it tells the story of a writer brought low by the strain of living up to his own avant-garde aspirations. The main ...”

“... Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his leadership. He has had opportunities unavailable to any other Labour leader, and he has thrown nearly all of them away. The greatest ...”

“... I associate with poets like Wordsworth and Arnold. The “great poetry” I like best has this self-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to consider itself.’ Harwood has spent his life going from job to job: forester, librarian, bus ...”

“... get to hear is semi-professional melancholians beating on tiny little tin drums, squelching, self-pitying, huffing, puffing and generally wallowing in their own bubble-bath solemnity: the sound of the Fabian Society drinking whisky sours in a hot-tub at a nudist colony. Colin McAdam isn’t from round here: he’s Canadian and lives in Australia. Some ...”

“... me better. You always doubted me, doubted my love, the deep emotion that made me give my whole self to you, only to you.’ In 1927, with money in mind, she began a memoir of their life together. It consisted largely of patchy diary entries (she would write these for a day or two then lapse: ‘It’s the same when I make up my mind to keep a record of our ...”

“... skin-crawlingly around: the past, it declared, was harder to escape than we thought. Next was the self-consciously musical Jazz (1992), then the extravagant, overwrought Paradise (1998), which I hoped was a glitch. Love includes something of all Morrison’s big themes: the position of black people in US society; the damage men do to women; the sustaining ...”

“... of Goodbye to Berlin with which he introduces himself means he’ll end up depicting his earlier self as a frivolous Weimar cosmopolite. It doesn’t quite work out that way. What’s more, the high-concept fun that The Golden House has with all these conceits isn’t, in practice, much fun, though not from a lack of incident. Petya and Apu quarrel over the ...”

“... palette and weak, overwrought compositions. In Promenade, Chagall depicts himself grinning self-consciously and made-up. He was by most accounts very vain; who else would make a painting such as The Poet Reclining (at Tate Modern, though not in Bilbao) on their honeymoon – an admiring self-portrait with no Bella in ...”

“... But strength and size are less significant than intent. Everyone can learn self-defence; and perhaps everyone should. But if someone is determined to rob you or grab you on the street, there may not be much that you, the average person going to the shops or walking home from a friend’s, drunk or distracted or tired from your week, can ...”

“... Germany had washed itself clean without: look, no fascism here. (This rather facile and painless self-absolving is one reason behind the rise of the AfD in eastern parts of Germany now.) Both of Elisabeth’s engineer brothers are tempted, but differently. The older one, Konrad, is ‘elbow-man brother’, with his ‘hasty, busy handwriting’, a ...”

“... hunt for those you get on with. On what level, though, do I meet their host? In a sense, he’s self-effacing: he speaks second person, forever exclaiming you! Other humans are what he cares for, and nothing could matter more. A pompous nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh ...”

“... going.Here’s my position:failing to gratify you would be folly on my part.This [gestures to self]or anything else you need – my wealth, my friends –it’s yours. I have one goal: for meto be the best Alkibiades I can be.You could help. Better than anyone else.I’d be ashamed not to give a man like youwhatever he wants.’At this Sokrates, in his ...”