“... advancement’. Sometimes even at the expense of his fellow officers: his famous – and much self-publicised – ‘great escape’ from the Boers in Pretoria in December 1899 left two comrades behind, fuming. He was quite brazen about this, which earned him little love among his fellow soldiers, or among his (very) senior officers, especially when – a ...”

“... Instead, it led to Britain as it is today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more insecure and more unequal. Thatcher’s policies were not the only factors in this transformation: the decline of traditional industries, a by-product of ...”

“... a period when British society in general and London society in particular was undergoing great and self-conscious change. Intellectual categories, social classes and character types were seen to be shifting as the inhabitants of an expanding capital at the heart of an expanding empire found themselves thrown together in new and odd configurations. The ...”

“... bottom of Diana’s eyes. Odder still, the kohl was sometimes blue. To Elsie, this was a form of self-mutilation: Diana might as well have taken crayons and scribbled all over herself. ‘Why must she do it?’ Elsie would ask, with genuine puzzlement. My grandmother was born in 1908, two years after Madeleine Carroll, the blonde star of The 39 Steps, whom ...”

“... perfectly catches Borges’s quickness, grace, learning and love of precision. It has a touch of self-deprecation too. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like the word ‘gold’ – a 1972 volume of verse is called The Gold of the Tigers – or as if he hadn’t tried plenty of verbal alchemy of his own. But a long attempt is quite different from an ...”

“... In almost every case, most of its members were doubtful that the territory was ‘ready for self-government’. They didn’t demur at the language in which witnesses spoke of the natives being ‘childish’, ‘fickle’, ‘impressionable’, ‘incapable of sustained effort’. This was especially true of Category C territories, such as New ...”

“... to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.’ Self-expression,​ desire, a get-out-of-jail-free card to protect against ‘bad consequences’: it isn’t hard to see how resonances particular to Maggie and Harry’s situation might outlive the fears Nelson suffered in her work about her aunt Jane. But ...”

“... more harm than good. Take the notion of a personality that persists through time – an enduring self or soul or spirit that can be loved or hated for its past actions and future projects. It is a ‘fiction’, according to Hume, based on unwarranted associations of ideas; but it is also indispensable to morality, and we might be wise to treat it as if it ...”

“... I stood up alone, feeling safe as I knew Mrs Booth liked me, and enjoying the glamour of the self-righteous. Ridiculous. But also, I thought everyone else was going to own up as well. I really did. Like in Spartacus. ‘It was me,’ ‘It was me.’ But no one stood up. Mrs Booth did praise me for standing up, I remember – I knew she would. But I also ...”

“... the official and the fictional versions, it upends the one-sidedness of Bellow’s furious and self-justifying letters, and offers an account that is never knowingly uncomplicated, sentimental or prejudiced, and never dull when it comes to the business of examining the writer’s inner world. Bellow’s community was his subject and his subject was his ...”

“... a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ...”

“... that the rules didn’t apply,’ but he doesn’t go here. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s euphoric self-affirmation is too lyrical, Gerty MacDowell’s allusions to menstruation too seemly and quaint. McBride has said that her aim is ‘to make language cope with and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into ...”

“... far the most experienced voice in the Leave camp, was that ‘the important issue is democracy and self-government. It is about that principle. Self-government is more important than anything else.’ Lawson or Farage, it comes to the same thing: Nigels against the world. But the voice is the voice of Enoch. Mr Powell, as he ...”

“... called Charlotte. True, however, by the accounts of all historians is the shattering blow to his self-esteem delivered when the Vienna Academy turned down his application to study art. ‘Too few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory.’ He had been fanatically certain that he would get in, and the wound of that rejection, perhaps his only solid ...”

“... Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of ...”