“... Union Jacks hanging limp at either side of the podium suggest a newish nation-state searching for self-confidence, one of the lesser-known stans perhaps. The lectern has ‘DOWNING STREET’ gilded on it, as though we might forget where we are.But the gimcrack fixtures and fittings should not delude us. This is intended to be a crucial new space in British ...”

“... let alone proper – for a novelist to feel grateful to a book he or she has written? Even if the self that wrote the book is forty years away, isn’t there something creepy or self-satisfied about it? I could pretend that it’s Flaubert I am grateful to, for without him my novel Flaubert’s Parrot could not have ...”

“... Rolex and Vacheron Constantin watches worth more than $100,000. ‘Watch Brother’ symbolised the self-enriching, out of touch, corrupt side of the CCP. This​ was the context for Document Number Nine, and it was also the point at which the CCP launched its counterattack. First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other ...”

“... and failures, Jenkins carried the burden of embodying the centre-left’s idea of its best self, the emblem for all those hopes that politics might be a bit more rational and enlightened and, well, agreeable than it actually is. He appeared to meet several of the job specifications for the role of social-democratic philosopher-king. And his own ...”

“... years shows. This journal, judiciously quoted in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest, had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent ...”

“... off people’. Then he went on: ‘I met him in Paris several times. He was a morose, completely self-contained little man. I was curious about him. I admired certain aspects of his work.’ He told another interviewer that he had letters from Joyce, ‘who asked me some years ago to make some confidential inquiries on business and related matters … I ...”

“... oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and self-constructed. The land was purchased in 1966, after Snyder returned to California following periods as a Zen Buddhist monk in Kyoto, in the engine room of an oil tanker, travelling through India with his ...”

“... choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian anthropologist’s respectably freaky show and tell. A couple of things should be made clear: one, Quincy Troupe is a black poet and academic, not some ofay ...”

“... companionably slipped his arm through mine: ‘pleased’ seems feeble, ‘proud’ seems absurdly self-important. Perhaps simply ‘moved’? Whatever it was it proved too strong for me quite to cope with, because after delivering him back at his flat I found that, even before I got home, I had started to cry. Karl Miller writes: A few weeks ago I visited ...”

“... a German and a Jew who had found asylum in America, giving of his knowledge in England without self-interest or thought of personal gain. I was carried away beyond thought of my own gain, beyond the welfare of M.M. to a vision of a world made utopian by the fellowship of nations and the conquest of old age. ‘Life, after all, is not important,’ the ...”

“... the dramatic irony derives from subsequent events. At the time, it might have seemed merely a self-dramatising reverie. Aris was an impractical and benignly self-centred husband; reading between the lines of Popham’s tactful account and those of family friends, there are hints that the marriage was not always ...”

“... government in Pristina were unhappy about the Kosovo Serbs casting votes in local elections under self-supervision, and strongly opposed to their voting in a Serbian general election. There were plenty of Nato troops in town, but everything went off quietly. A Serb in his sixties, a little drunk, approached the huddle of reporters outside the polling station ...”

“... changed Yeats’s view of himself, as well as how others saw him: a process that fed back into the self and shadow presented in the verse. So an account of the growth of his mind has to be steeped in literary analysis to a degree unusual in biography. The problem is the more pressing because Yeats freed himself to write by striking attitudes, assuming personas ...”

“... increasing degrees of specificity) as an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi and a Litvak, but this self-identification, I have to acknowledge, is strange. It is true that my grandparents were born in Lithuania: my father’s parents in Kovna, my mother’s in Vilna. But they left for America sometime in the early 1890s, and, with a single exception, it was ...”

“... in disguise and no intention to seduce, just the metal shimmering and falling, in consummate self-expression, as deity and dogma. Islamic approaches – there are quite a few – are much closer to Nonconformist and Anglican traditions, where the divinity stands to the side of money, reminding the faithful that he is one thing and mammon ...”