“... of the motifs of Taubes’s fiction: a protagonist in a state of eerie suspension; a desire for self-determination coupled with an equal desire to be squashed by something or someone bigger. In Divorcing, Sophie is everywhere and nowhere. She’s a dead woman in a coffin suspended from the ceiling. She’s in Paris, in Budapest, with one lover and then ...”

“... a romantic view of oneself; distinction is only tardily conceded by others. In the business of self-assessment – which was her business – Colette was never far from self-promotion. This endeavour sustained her through three marriages, numerous love affairs, and, more important in her own estimation, 49 volumes, some ...”

“... was sparse (it ended at 15, if it ever really began), but he was a furious reader. He was always self-conscious about his peasant origins, and tried to drown them out with a noisy extravagance of opinion, and by proclaiming a Nietzschean aristocracy of spirit. From adolescence, he was obsessively determined to become a great writer; his late teens and ...”

“... Lexicon: ‘Staple synonym always available for goalkeeper. Likely to be used with a degree of wry self-consciousness these days.’ Wry self-consciousness, though quite a standby for some of us when it comes to using clichés, is not perhaps an attitude widely shared among football writers and broadcasters, so it’s easy ...”

“... in its subtitle as the biography of its subject, the next best thing is for it to appear as a self-help book. Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a model of its kind, came out in paperback in the spring. Playing, in a manner of speaking, Achilles to de Botton’s tortoise, Nicholas Fearn’s Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think like a ...”

“... they had better well be timeless, and if they were not going to be linky, they had better well be self-contained.’ In other words, for an anthology of blogs to work, the blogs it contains have to be as unbloglike – as booklike – as possible. Boxer retreats behind an argument about style: all the pieces she’s chosen are ‘distinctly bloggy’, by ...”

“... Memory,’​ my mother remarked, distress masked by her usual self-mocking humour, ‘is a thing of the past.’ She was 85 and sliding into the dementia that would ultimately erase all remembrance. Increasingly haunted by the fear that she had, literally, nothing to say, nervous of gaps in conversation, she would make things up, their frequently bizarre character a reminder that social inhibition is itself a function of deep-laid memories: ‘Oh, the royal family? Of course they suffer from all sorts of unmentionable diseases, you know ...”

“... that took account of the new natural sciences: a system in which virtue would be pursued not from self-centred fear of punishment, human or divine, or in expectation of personal rewards, but out of sheer delight in ‘the knowledge and love of God’. He shared some manuscripts with friends back in Amsterdam, and they responded with comments, requests for ...”

“... per capita of any country except China.Identity theft, the electronic appropriation of a file-self for nefarious purposes, is now a well known hazard of the internet. More trivial, but often stubbornly resistant to correction, are the random mutations of file-selves caused by typos in data entry. Of all bureaucratic identity documents, the passport is ...”

“... who had been for a month in prison and crushed and buffeted and loaded with insults, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice ... most leonine and sphinx-like.’ Max considered that Gill, the prosecuting counsel, had let Oscar down very lightly; and he commented on the ‘renters’, young male ...”

“... and cannot break The circle of it to see it as it is. This might seem to sanction a solipsistic self-absorption. But only if one assumes that to be inside one’s life is to be inside an essential self. In recent years, the demand for autobiographical frankness has been complicated by the dissemination of the view that no ...”

“... along with his interpretation. How could one not assent to so gentle a request by a speaker whose self-deprecating modesty had already won that part of the audience which had not come starry-eyed to the famous presence.He went on to one of the main texts, Marcel Mauss’s famous, brief Essai sur le don (The Gift). Derrida said the gifts Mauss described were ...”

“... and the original of Miss Birdseye in James’s Bostonians, tartly remarked ‘her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband’ – while her physically delicate and sensitive son grew up both sheltered and indulged by his Manning relatives. An early injury to his foot, which sidelined him for more than a year, intensified a certain ...”

“... changed its nature. The trivial and quotidian were dignified by the attention given them, and the self-consciously important found no place in the novel’s scheme. Towards the end of the book the hero read in his Penguin Marcus Aurelius the gloomy aphorism that human life is no more than sperm and ashes, and felt no sympathy for it. The modest richness of ...”

“... Yet when she walks out on him, he is released only into a different sense of the same vacancy of self: ‘Nothing happens. It’s as though I’d ceased to exist.’ And what has he ever achieved? ‘At 36 I’m nothing.’ But then the quest to Ireland cannot simply restore him to being someone. ‘Like the man in that photograph, he had once been ...”