“... with their arrogance and their aggressiveness, their contempt for the rest of us, their supreme self-satisfaction and self-confidence. The last of this species – Zola’s Octave (inventor of the first department store) and Maupassant’s ‘bel ami’ – still marry into money, but finally trace a route for their ...”

“... of how hated Germany has become in parts of Southern Europe feel merely pained, misunderstood. The self-image of Germany as a bewildered, kindly nation, helpless to defend itself against greedy neighbours, dies hard. It was lent credibility a few weeks ago by an eccentric European Central Bank report which asserted that – in terms of ‘per household ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and, in a special position of repute and influence, the Manchester Guardian, yielded nothing in self-esteem to the London papers, although most of them had a guilty secret: they were supported by evening papers whose essential function was to provide the racing results. That was true not least of the austere Guardian, subsidised by the Manchester Evening ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th, he argues, ‘social thinkers had encircled the self with wider and wider rings of relations, structures, contexts and institutions. Human beings were born into social norms, it was said. Their life chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape ...”

“... a further salience because the journeys undertaken involve a complex negotiation between the self-consciously contemporary and the self-consciously archaic. The condition of that salience is rhetorical rather than narrative. On each occasion, a Bowling-esque rant against the modern world’s artificiality provides a ...”

“... basis of whom they feared more, the army or the Brothers. In Cairo, the old, narrow politics of self-interest – or self-defence – seemed to be crowding out Tahrir Square’s expansive visions of a democratic future. I wondered whether Alexandria, a port city with a rich history of political independence, would be any ...”

“... the Grantham years of strict Methodism and endless homework, before she lost her essential self in becoming a manufactured, voiced-coached projection. Like the robot warrior Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A mantle of silence had fallen over land and river. The elderly couple now perched on hard benches, with bowed heads, resting, enjoying their ...”