“... Jia is a genre novelist, whose books have sold several million copies in China, and an assiduous self-publicist. When Mai Jia’s publisher told the press he would pay an advance of ten million yuan for his new novel, Whisper of the Wind, Mai Jia denied the story, denounced his publisher as a hype artist and so got double the exposure. The TV adaptation of ...”

“... dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing things like that?’ In his memoir – self-published, self-justifying – the chief of medicine, Richard Deichmann, claimed it was necessary to shut down the hospital fast because ‘patients with all kinds of serious infections … in intimate, unsanitary ...”

“... more characteristic trait of Mann’s writing, the reason Nabokov dismissed him as a pretentiously self-monumentalising nonentity. One scarcely thinks of playfulness in connection with Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, and Joseph and His Brothers, whatever comic interludes it may include, tends to sink under the weight of its narrative detail and its ...”

“... and the perspective of TN with which I am directly presented are not the point of view of the true self, for the true self has no point of view … Something essential about me has nothing to do with my perspective and position in the world. ‘Unless you have had this thought yourself,’ Nagel writes, ‘it will probably ...”

“... inner compositions which, like magnets, attract further impressions and serve as the core of the self’s creative articulation.’ This seems exactly right, and very important. What comes out of a successful analysis is the discovery not of a hidden desire but of primordial structures of motivation that organise one’s experience of ...”

“... and not enough granite in her being. The missing granite is provided by Anne Lindell, Violet’s self-portrait in Broderie anglaise, no longer a character cloaked in legend like Sasha, a mirage disappearing into the distance. Far from being a ravishingly beautiful woman, she ‘wasn’t even pretty’. ‘Her features were irregular; her nose turned up, her ...”

“... the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. These lines from ‘Wet Casements’ stage the philosophical problem of other minds, of trying to justify the belief that others have an inner experience like our own. The passage seems to ...”

“... profit and an indifference towards the desires of others behind a carapace of moral elevation and self-congratulation. There is another, less obvious anachronism. Christianity plays a strange role in writings about Roman history. Partly because of the way disciplinary specialisms work within the academy, and partly because of a residual commitment to a kind ...”

“... subjects not citizens. This fixity of citizenship, its exclusivity, formed the hard core of their self-identification. To have two patriae, to be a Roman and also an Athenian, a Gaul or a Samaritan, was only made conceivable by the Romans, who created the only ancient culture that could see noble motives in those that opposed it: Romans ‘make a desolation ...”

“... to anything.’ But for middle-class women even adaptability and talent could not guarantee self-sufficiency. For all the distinction of her writing, Christina Rossetti was never able to secure an adequate income. Her attempts to do so by founding a school with her mother, as Elizabeth Sewell had done with her sister, ended in failure. For most of her ...”

“... but insecure London. All That Man Is is a suite of nine moral stories (unconnected, but self-assembled in the reader’s mind into a sort of collage-novel) persuasively set in different milieux across a new, East-ish, un-glam, second-tier or easyJet Europe – not Athens, Barcelona, Paris and Rome, but Charleroi, Frankfurt-Hahn, Katowice, Larnaca ...”

“... are by Schipper’s definition conservative, and they present their tendentious opinions as self-evident truths about human nature. Layered with caustic, tongue-in-cheek ambiguity, gnomic utterances are like oracles in their contradictions and double entendres. Schipper’s working definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her ...”

“... and motivations of British officials’ had destroyed the ‘myths’ of the efficiency and ‘self-sacrificial esprit de corps’ of the ICS. The main problem with Spangenberg’s ‘scrutiny’ is that it ignored almost all the private papers of ICS officers that he could easily have studied. Yet the limitations of the thesis did not deter a bevy of ...”

“... attention from, the role of imperialism in Americans’ own state formation, foreign policy and self-image. At another, it has become an article of faith with many Americans that it was European imperialism which gave birth to the racial animosities and attitudes that so trouble their own society, and that only by a thorough and sceptical excavation of ...”

“... What this pure Geistesgeschichte underplays is a sense of context. Greenough recognised, partly in self-criticism, that in a new country the old classical ‘character’ would not do: America, he says, must find its own forms. Only in a continent with an infinity of practical tasks before it and a boundless biology of its own to explore could ‘form follows ...”