“... part of the war on terror. The US elevation of Zarqawi to the front rank of al-Qaida leaders was self-fulfilling. To many Iraqis and Muslims wanting to fight the US, he became a symbol of resistance. His notoriety made it easy for him to raise money. In December 2004, Osama bin Laden declared that he was head of al-Qaida in Iraq. ‘The Islamists often seem ...”

“... that ‘blacks were unfit for democracy, somehow too childlike or too unready or too incapable of self-governing.’ Bumiller doesn’t doubt the sincerity of these reflections on the road from Birmingham to Baghdad: ‘Rice spoke with such intensity and fervour that if she was exploiting history and her own life to make a dubious political point . . . it ...”

“... perfectly articulated group, lit with a strong sense of theatre – the saint has something of the self-consciousness of a player in a crime scene re-enactment. Batoni priced these pictures himself, and some were still on his hands when he died, the major assets of an estate that, reduced by his handsome style of living, could not meet the bequests made in his ...”

“... leave twenty million dead instantly. Christopher Clark’s breathtakingly good book is, much more self-consciously than Tuchman’s, also a history for its – that is, our – times. An act of terrorism in Sarajevo – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife – led the Austrian government to make demands on Serbia. If not ...”

“... series of mere technicalities: if, in other words, the history is not to be trivialised. Given the self-protective limits of our capacity to understand a phenomenon such as the attempted annihilation of whole peoples – a capacity which our mass media are designed further to impair – some trivialisation is inevitable. And since this is a past which won’t ...”

“... Ghost).Berlin and bildungsroman, you say. OK, so he’s a camera: get on with it. But, self-plagiarism apart, I think that Mailer is distilling an important knowledge from his many earlier reflections on violence and perversity and low life. As Balzac knew, and as Dix Butler boasts, the criminal and sexual outlaw world may be anarchic, but it is ...”

“... In Tristes Tropiques, his memoir of his fieldwork among the Indians of Brazil, he called the self ‘hateful’. Everything he wrote aimed to puncture the notions of will and agency that cluster around the human subject. The critique of the subject was central to structuralism, the school of thought he helped to found. He existed, he wrote in the ...”

“... making phones or yoga tops: it’s all work, variously risky and soul-destroying forms of self-rental.‘Some surrogacy abolitionists will … mistake me for a “neoliberal” advocate of the industry,’ Lewis writes. ‘Much to my chagrin.’ She defines her position as ‘21st-century communist ...”

“... one might have found in a child’s nursery library from the 1890s. He hovers on the edge of self-mockery without committing to it: I was thinking initially of Achilles sitting in his tent and about whether that was a first example of industrial action … Let me start with that sad day in March 1603, when our beloved sovereign of blessed ...”

“... Island. The account of their relationship in Here Lies the Heart is full of Mercedes’s usual self-serving B-movie twaddle. (‘When I saw Isadora Duncan for the first time in my life she waved a scarf at me, and the last time I saw her she waved a scarf at me. And it was a scarf that killed her!’) On one unforgettable occasion, de Acosta wrote, Duncan ...”

“... Being unillusioned was his speciality, and in public he took a nicely self-deprecating line. ‘There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously,’ he writes in The Summing Up (1938), ‘and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering ...”

“... the fucking stipend? Lewis.’‘Life has been something of a war for me,’ he wrote in forlorn self-exile at a New York hotel in 1939; but this cast of mind predated his time in the army. His very earliest stories were written while he was staying in Brittany in 1908, belatedly collected as The Wild Body twenty years later, and they show that Lewis ...”

“... a nightmare of denial.In the ‘way-west’ myth that underpins Didion’s idea of her Californian self, there is always the struggle to get there. ‘You drop baggage,’ she wrote, ‘you jettison the piano and the books and your grandmother’s rosewood chest, or you don’t get to Independence Rock in time to make the Sierra before snowfall.’ At the time ...”

“... rocks and then the stony strand. The heat was baking and the sea was almost warm. Despite self-admonition he kept his eyes peeled for the passage of those two women, a recent rapid glimpse of whom in a small car being driven by the beauty had set his heart stabbing with undilutable power. Happier he was, though, to want no one and nothing. The rich ...”

“... end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such as Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka (about whom I wrote in ...”