“... border: in Tell Me How It Ends, the confident posture of nonfiction; in Lost Children Archive, the self-conscious narrator who mistrusts the possibility of representation. In both books, not only can Luiselli not tell us how it ends, but she resists telling us what to think. And yet her fictional narrator does have a goal for her own storytelling: ‘Helping ...”

“... It was a compulsion to achieve something durable, beyond the ordinary limits of the self, he says in the Carnets, because writing is a search for ‘polypersonality’. Some people find the Memoirs and Carnets frustrating for their lack of personal material: almost no mention of the three wives, one of whom was driven mad by the tensions of the ...”

“... to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ...”

“... sanctimoniousness tempered by cowardice – of Western policy, his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly ...”

“... to another. The book struck me as tedious, certainly not dirty in any obvious way, and massively self-important. In those unpolitical days of mine, I had no idea what I had really bought: a fruit of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of its many subsidiaries. A few years later, when I got my first job at Columbia University in 1963, I met many of ...”

“... treated in the novels is one of the keys to their interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is no ludic or ironic component to the series, just ...”

“... from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control.’ Eugenics, or ‘self-directed evolution’ as it was styled by its proponents, signalled the way towards a utopian future. In 1913, that promise acquired human form with the birth in London of a ‘eugenic baby’, the product of careful breeding. She was christened ...”

“... though no proof was adduced. Enrolling at the Institute of Transport Engineers in 1880, he set up self-education groups among the students, and in the same year joined Narodnaia Volia. The organisation – its name means ‘People’s Will’, though it is occasionally rendered as ‘People’s Freedom’ – was formed in the summer of 1879; its first aim ...”

“... just as King had done after ousting Bartholomew, he inherited his victim’s job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a ...”

“... of the newborn’s mother removes her wishes and concerns entirely from the equation – hardly self-evident assumptions from many moral perspectives. And this raises the general difficulty of separating the value-neutral facts of a case from the moral intuitions we are supposed to bring to bear on it. If our differing intuitions lead us to contest more or ...”

“... tentative, experimental trying on and putting off of identities, the improvisational efforts at self-definition characteristic of a time when both Irishmen and gay men were striving to forge in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of their respective races – and were doing it, like Stephen Daedalus, through writing. Gay community has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sir Hugh Casson, who had directed the architecture of the Festival of Britain, was lively-minded, self-critical and immune to lying propaganda; his vivid journal of the trip is one of Wright’s best sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in ...”

“... of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her part and implacable calm, or the appearance of it, on ...”

“... succession formula is one of the key components of any political system, Putin’s stage-managed self-coronation makes it clear that Russia doesn’t have one. To leave the decision about one’s successor to the unpredictable outcome of a genuinely competitive election is acceptable only when incumbents don’t expect to lose too much if they lose. In ...”