“... that this reveals – in the face of misadventures that would have sunk most such zealous self-promoters – would alone merit a careful investigation of how Alcibiades worked his magic. The number of those seemingly taken in by him, beginning with Thucydides and including various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place ...”

“... fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet. Ellis’s most successful satire was self-satire: Lunar Park, a postmodern haunted house novel filled with post 9/11 dreads, in-jokes and autobiographical notes, with Jay and Bret themselves futzing around as doofus sidekicks. An uncharacteristically companionable novel from Mr Trendy Sicko, it also ...”

“... stuff gets lost along the way – including, perhaps, the main thing that makes this magnificently self-indulgent cetological feast so delicious. Whaling could produce a great novel because it’s an activity in which a lot of what are now distinct arts and sciences messily converge. Hunting meets marine biology meets global economics meets geography meets ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit ...”

“... through the promise of free exploration and rebirth, to the blank acceptance or celebration of self-extinction. In the act of ‘discovering America’, Conrad tells us in the introductory chapter, these writers were really ‘discovering’ themselves. And yet all of them were known to be what they were, for good or ill, before they got there. What really ...”

“... claims about the ample scope of phenomena about which they can say something wise-sounding and self-consistent. The relevant question should be, not whether the favoured theory can ‘cover’ a given phenomenon, but whether it provides us with the most plausible of competing explanations. To make such a case, it is of course necessary to weigh one’s own ...”

“... a literary activity: it was a weapon. Physically, he was small and unremarkable. Socially, he was self-conscious about his background. In one of the many letters to Nancy Mitford printed here, he says he had never realised that he was not a gentleman until it had been pointed out to him by Lady Burghclere, his first mother-in-law. The tone is ironic – but ...”

“... indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often praises Orwell’s style, and even observes its progressive refinement. He must have been conscious throughout of a formidable reader over his shoulder: but he evidently did not ask himself how many faults Orwell would have ...”

“... and patient exploration, in which (often against much resistance and spite and lack of faith in self and life) all sorts of healthy and human potentials came to light: potentials which had somehow survived twenty years of severe Tourette’s and ‘Touretty’ life, hidden in the deepest and strongest core of the personality. This deep exploration was ...”

“... are two Kincaids: Elaine Potter Richardson, the daughter of the domineering Annie Drew, and the self-fashioning writer, Jamaica Kincaid. In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build ...”

“... influences’, while at the same time rebutting claims of racial inferiority and agitating for self-government in West Africa. Respect and disdain for British society fostered a belief in national self-government, which would play out in the politics of the next generation of students. The rise of racism and national ...”

“... subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the ‘I’ in her poems for straightforward self-expression. ‘When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency,’ she says in Salvage. ‘Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analysed, refashioned as art and made theoretical ...”

“... a state-imposed exile from the centres of imperial power in St Petersburg and Moscow and then to a self-imposed flight to the West. Herzen initially found inspiration in the French Revolution, but the suffocating bourgeois capitalism that had triumphed across Europe and culminated in the failed revolution of 1848 led him to seek alternatives elsewhere. Before ...”

“... the ‘true Sudan thirst’, which amounted to the ‘perpetual liquefaction and evaporation’ of self. This could be tackled only with an evening regime of comprehensive rehydration beginning with tea and ending with ‘that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed – gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda’. Once Anglo-Saxon drinkers ...”