“... literature concerned with the effects of technology on American arts and manners. Even the self-made idiom of Still the New World passes through distinct layers from having been evolved in separate stages of composition. A thoughtful chapter about the dependence of privacy, in the fictions of realism, on a threat of publicity and exposure, was first ...”

“... In the decades before and immediately following Independence, most Africans were either directly self-sufficient or part of an extended family that was – hardly anyone was more than one generation from the land. Politics was an urban pursuit, conducted at some distance from the realities of most peoples’ lives, and politicians could be certain that ...”

“... at the time, and have been preserved whole, what you find is a pervasive sentimentality, a strong self-referential tendency, a structure of iron logic. The Incorruptible was also the unpredictable. He was a fissiparous bundle of contradictions. He idealised ‘the people’ and profoundly distrusted anyone who claimed to speak for them. He distrusted the very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in FDR’s inaugural address, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ written by the self-help guru Napoleon Hill, author of the 1937 runaway bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. The president knew how to carry out Hill’s positive-thinking agenda. His first official act was a masterstroke of spin: he closed the banks to prevent them failing and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by the growing strength of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was ...”

“... with the droppings of generations of vultures, makes my great-uncle’s voice speed up and a self-consciously practical, unemotional man turn lyrical, like a mannered Victorian poet, even though, as he admits, he was recounting the memory of a memory. ‘For long enough,’ he says, ‘I used to smell again in memory the reek of the dead feline, and ...”