“... exclude flexibility and intimacy and can in any case be deceptive. Crystals of agency and self-interest can precipitate out of an apparently neutral solution. Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth could be categorised as masked first-person narratives, since the impersonal authority of the story being told unravels towards the end of each book, with the ...”

“... without it being ‘fine writing’ as so much pastoral writing is. What it is, though it’s self-serving to say so, is a commentary on the last speech from Forty Years On: ‘Were we closer to the ground as children or is the grass emptier now?’20 June. When from 1944-45 we lived in Guildford, we often ate (had to eat, the truth of it) in the British ...”

“... them altogether. He has become a martyr figure somewhat after the fashion of Schoenberg, also self-appointed to a role of revolutionary innovator; the special prize Boulez has paid is not increasing isolation but creative sterility – compositions have flowed ever more slowly from his pen. (Répons, 1980, for ensemble and live electronics, is his only ...”

“... calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware. Calvino himself embraced the description. The Uses of Literature, a selection of his non-fiction published in English in 1986, opens: ‘It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.’ He is also called a fabulist, as much for his narrative ...”

“... people under the heel of American imperialism’ nor a ‘national minority’ in need of separate self-determination. His travels had moderated those views, but if he now recognised that racial oppression was endemic and transnational, he was still certain that it was shaped by local conditions and cultures, in ways that would dictate different ...”

“... has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of ...”

“... at times, but monstrous nonetheless in the sheer scale of their lives and characters and in the self-belief that propelled what might have been, in smaller personalities, merely enthusiasms or inclinations onto the world stage. Lady Redesdale said that whenever she saw a headline beginning ‘Peer’s Daughter …’ she knew it would be one of hers. They ...”

“... although conceived as a ‘counter-commemoration’, his seven volumes had been integrated into a self-indulgent heritage culture, of whose vices he had always been well aware, but which would remain pervasive as long as France had not found a firm new footing in the world. This ingenious sophistry could not conceal that the whole enterprise of Les Lieux de ...”

“... collaborations,gaining or losing significant traits, an endlessly augmenting dish?My single self sickens, understanding itselfas slave to DNA – all the blood-flesh agonies of loveto end as a husk on your knees as I’m now on my knees –something about how the crickets contract in death, and the heat,and my own lack of volition, desire and its ...”

“... on DonorsChoose.org – as anyone with a credit card can do – I buy things for my younger self, usually books I know she’ll enjoy: The Giver, The Westing Game. For a special treat, I join other donors to pay for a trip to the Smithsonian. Sometimes I buy things she won’t really appreciate, but might later: chemistry study guides, The Omnivore’s ...”

“... in for Iris’s linguistic disorientation, her face refracted in a window-pane for her fragmented self. But the effect of such scenes, in the end, is to point up film’s difficulty in rendering a life ‘lived in the mind’. That doesn’t stop it trying. Roles drawn from life in which artistic genius is crossed with profound illness are thought especially ...”

“... by their inane and obedient pecking that the behaviourist view of things didn’t have any need of self-consciousness to explain how it is we learn to do what we do. So are parrots in a different case? Have we underestimated them in supposing that, far from having cognitive abilities of their own, they were to be admired for nothing more than mindlessly ...”

“... fixed in front of the sink and beneath the stairs. The session begins. As in this year’s Self-Portrait (pencil, acrylic, graphite, crayon and Indian ink), the painter narrows his eyes and lifts his chin and grimaces, like Edgar in King Lear, spotting choughs from the clifftop. Usually we talk for the first hour. Then, after a five-second break, he ...”

“... image of late Georgian psychiatry is not Tuke sipping tea with his patients in an institution self-consciously designed and run like a large country house, but the imperious keeper able to reduce the ranting and raving to docility and obedience through the moral force of his gaze. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the use of this technique came to ...”

“... reappropriated. But the circumstances were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven ...”