“... is through peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. In addition to being a vehicle for self-promotion, often at others’ expense, The Seven Daughters of Eve serves as a marketing device. The dust cover of the hardback edition proclaimed that Sykes ‘has always emphasised the importance of the individual in shaping our genetic world. The website ...”

“... the winning charisma of billboard bimbo Angelyne, vertically-challenged child star Gary Coleman, self-proclaimed smut peddler Larry Flynt, and 151 other amusing candidates ($3500 was enough to get your name on the ballot). These included the ultra-right, anti-abortion state senator Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball ...”

“... men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.The novel is peppered with ...”

“... in the Dáil to explain what he regretted most about his time at the wheel: the failure of a self-aggrandising stadium project in Dublin, nicknamed the ‘Bertie Bowl’, which had led his own coalition partners to compare him to Nicolae Ceausescu. With this mea culpa went the news that the man of the people would be drawing a pension of almost ...”

“... simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.’ Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The Marriage Plot, and sought to marry the formal mechanics and self-consciousness of postmodernism with the moral and ...”

“... the guest quarters.’ We are clearly in the world of Nothing On here. But we’re also in the self-aware, self-consciously theatrical world of Noises Off. Skios just about observes the classical unities of place (the island of Skios), time (a single 24-hour period) and action: everything that happens has its place in ...”

“... in holy orders: ‘They were the last people you would expect to be converted to the cause of self-pampering.’ Whatever the reason for their failure, the history of the Cambridge baths is a nice case of the ambivalence of the modern world’s engagement with the ancient. It shows the combination of enthusiasm and lack of interest, learned reconstruction ...”

“... Uncle Sam teaching an infant Cuba how to ride a bike: a symbol of ‘freedom and liberty, self-possession and self-control’. The US military occupation of Cuba began on 1 January 1899, 60 years to the day before Che Guevara led a ragtag band of guerrillas into the streets of Havana. The decades in between saw an ...”

“... back at the hospital, I sat on the wards and held patients’ hands, chatting with whatever self they were that day. It seemed as good a use of my time as any. Our hospital had once been a workhouse and some patients still thought it was. It was an easy place in which to lose the will to live. About once a fortnight I would get away after lunch, and ...”

“... childhood, we see a world of enchanted, stationary time, where everything conspires to protect the self and the community against threats to calm and wellbeing. The very place is a trope aimed at the horrors of noisy Romanticism: ‘There is no sea, no tall mountains, cliffs or chasms, no slumberous forests – nothing grandiose, wild, and gloomy.’ ‘No ...”

“... ensues, the name is presumably derived from ‘tally-ho!’). It is a witty study of hypocritical self-interest and genuine self-doubt – the young poet dislikes his first encounter with the sea because of the banality of his response to it, and the ‘trashy comparisons’ it provokes – which gradually turns ...”

“... Hilary Mantel put it less generously, but more succinctly: ‘Nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job.’ The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the ...”

“... that, as Powell said on his retirement in 1987, would have seemed ‘incredible’ to his younger self and remained ‘incomprehensible’. What he could not comprehend was the abnegation of national sovereignty. Alienated and alarmed, baffled and betrayed, Powell was ready to scheme tactically with the Labour Party, and sat in the Commons as an Ulster ...”

“... and any attunement to religion has been filtered out. The effect is to make him not just self-taught – as he was known to be – but self-made, and to turn him into an unconsoled scrutiniser of mortality, a sort of outsider artist. It’s true that one of his teatrini depicting the effects of syphilis is ...”

“... this a precocious understanding of the value of the autographed work; or a piece of metaphorical self-dismemberment?) What she wants now is to become a hybrid of Flip and the land artist Robert Smithson, who made his mark on Utah’s topography with his immense coiling earthwork, Spiral Jetty. As Reno explains to her New York boyfriend, Sandro Valera (an ...”