“... 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 ...”

“... Between one dash and the next, as in the passage below, his passions move from an imagined self-assertion (as a cannibal, no less) to an imputed self-abasement (shame, deceit, cowardice). – and there was something unnatural and at first glance even enigmatic in the passionate and almost reverential way in which ...”

“... of some important painters, notably Degas and Monet, but his comments on art were either self-inflating pronouncements or insults (a Sargent portrait, he said, showed the ‘cleverness of an officer who cuts up oranges into fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to ...”

“... nothing but their own myths of themselves, shambling golems moulded together out of fear, out of self-loathing and arrogance and delusion and lust. And animated by a stamp. His life is approaching a crisis. Various menaces are converging. Jared Sprain, a depressed customer, commits suicide before Mailman can deliver a comforting letter from a ...”

“... a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five months before Highsmith was born, her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; she later told her daughter about ...”

“... foot and ankle are leaving the picture. ‘To the right of the canvas I read the small typed card: Self-Portrait by William Wechsler.’ Everybody who will matter in the story, apart from the children, is involved with the picture: Bill Wechsler paints it; Violet, Bill’s lover and model, is shown centre-stage in it; Lucille, his poet wife, exits the frame ...”

“... 2012, and even when they do, the scenery is pretty inconsequential. Surprisingly, Essex is rather self-effacing. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ there, after ...”

“... an article about elephant insemination. Was that a deliberate decision to show the solipsism and self-absorption of Harvard undergraduates?A year and a half later, in September 2018, I had a similar encounter at the Mantua book festival. The political mood, and my role in it, felt strangely familiar. Matteo Salvini, a far-right nativist Eurosceptic widely ...”

“... graphical elements.’ Notwithstanding his graphical elements, Davis has indeed won the backing of self-described civil libertarians, including the usefully telegenic Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, who threatened to sue Labour’s culture secretary over his suggestion that she shouldn’t be getting into bed (politically speaking) with a ...”

“... had) and Saul Bellow’s voice is nearly musical (in the way of an advertising jingle) with self-belief. On the whole, the American CD is more satisfying because it gives you a collection of writers who seem to revel in the performance of themselves. Henry Miller sounds like a longshoreman ordering his breakfast. But the overall prize goes to ...”

“... of sensory input, our mind enters a state of severe “stimulus hunger”, and the subjective self emerges forcefully.’ So the unatmospheric lighting in my cellar is the problem after all. However, ‘in neurological terms, there is no consensus on the biochemical and neurophysiological mechanism of hallucination in a state of sensory ...”

“... Today, seven out of ten immigration removal centres in Britain are privately run. Instances of ‘self-harm’ are common in these places: in the last four months of 2007 alone, 42 detainees required medical attention after injuring themselves. Asylum seekers facing possible deportation to countries where they’re likely to be jailed, tortured or killed ...”

“... that X event would happen, Downing Street was ensuring that there was no way it could. The self-cancelling circularity of the thing would cause even the toughest political correspondent to wonder whether he was in the right line of work. It would be nice to think that the government was busy conducting a Schrödinger-like quantum experiment with cats ...”

“... took place, the legal justification for the kill order – that it was an act of national self-defence against an imminent threat, as described in Article 51 of the UN Charter – looked shaky, to say the least, and will be challenged. Aerial drones have somehow come to stand for the scary future of war. They hover invisibly overhead, and can fire ...”

“... stern, and suffused with Buddhist notions of impermanence, suffering and the abnegation of self, quite unlike Pickard’s conversational, often playful tone and distinctly unphilosophical outlook. He is curious, restless, anxious to get out on the fells, interested in the weather, topography, sky, birdlife (he’s a serious birder) and especially the ...”