“... up anger. Above all, he read the marches last January as a massive show of anti-egalitarian self-regard, when those who took part or looked on with pride saw them as an affirmation of French values, including freedom of expression. Todd’s mode of delivery, a mixture of abrasiveness and superiority, has added to the offence: Who is Charlie? is laden ...”

“... cultural celebrity by the vogue for working-class sentimentalism in the 1960s and lefter-than-thou self-righteousness in the 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of his death, positive assessments understandably predominated. Some moving tributes appeared as former comrades, colleagues and students tried to take stock, emotionally and personally as well as in ...”

“... indicated by this and similar quotations (including one, I am disconcerted to find, by my younger self), the term expanded at some point to embrace historical accounts of ‘continuing and inevitable’ progress in any desirable direction, rather than simply the direction implied in the original political sense. The clue – a rather gnomic one – to the ...”

“... job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for ...”

“... as he put it, ‘almost for “fun”’, this combination of expressionist political fable and self-pitying fantasy is Hamilton’s most arresting novel. The Slaves of Solitude, its follow-up, was assembled much more painfully. Hamilton finished it by taking to his bed in Henley early in 1946, not long after Bruce had worked out that he was spending £2000 ...”

“... of fractures and abscesses than exposure to accident as a professional hazard. Every Man is in its self-mythologising way the record of a charmed life. The tarantula Herzog once found asleep in one of his shoes and the giant scorpion which spent the night under him in a hammock both declined, for reasons best known to themselves, to put an end to him. A plane ...”

“... to recognise Eileen’s ‘humanising influence’ and characterises her letters as ‘poignant, self-effacing, hopeful and yet full of hurt’. But Funder’s wider aim is to show that ‘wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.’ She ascribes ...”

“... of Mondrian as well as the formalist criticism of Roger Fry; he saw a ‘disdain for the self’ in both. ‘The new painter,’ Newman insisted, ‘is concerned with his subject matter, with his thought.’ The term ‘plasmic image’ didn’t catch on, but he had more luck with ‘ideographic picture’, the title of an essay published in ...”

“... Donald Trump, whose narcissistic exhibitionism offered a never-ending source of unintentional self-satire. ‘Who’s my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really ...”

“... this year, released from the Beast and now a hollowed-out, understaffed shell of its former self, saw its managers fire a group of their own senior journalists in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress an investigation into the magazine’s finances. Newsweek was particularly vulnerable to the flood of free information and images unleashed by the ...”

“... that was ‘unmodern’. This notion persisted after decolonisation and in many ways shapes our self-understanding. ‘In several respects,’ Mbembe writes, ‘Africa still constitutes the metaphor through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image and integrates this image into the set ...”

“... In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote: I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognise myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar. Some years ago I tried to get away from him: I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and infinity. But these are Borges’s games ...”

“... he looks pale, spindly and rather stupid: a poorly-fed, late Victorian adolescent overfond of self-abuse. In the second, the one with the moustache, he is stouter, tougher, dreamier, and looks distressingly like both my mother and my cousin Toby. My companion Blakey says he looks like me. I don’t see it. I’ve been fascinated by him – and the Great ...”

“... wrought, judicious introduction describes Browne’s wide-ranging curiosity, his influences, his self-fascination, his faith and doubts. A pocket edition of Browne is good to have not least because his aphoristic style rewards casual reading. Open it at any page, and find a surprise. Browne thought of himself as a natural philosopher, what we would now call ...”

“... be the result of the greater seriousness and scale of the undertaking. But there is a good deal of self-criticism in the press, and evidence of a bad conscience about the country’s absurd dependency on cheap oil and on the political arrangements necessary to guarantee it. I think, also, that there is a vague impression that Arab nationalism might have a ...”