“... 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 ...”

“... Bigger ‘the black rebel of the ghetto’, with ‘no trace … of the Martin Luther King-type self-effacing love for his oppressors’. For Cleaver, who wrote in his memoir that he had practised raping black women before graduating to white women, Bigger embodied an authentic, revolutionary black masculinity that Baldwin, a gay man, naturally despised.The ...”

“... has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across oceans. Nobody told this brainwashed Manchurian Candidate that he was supposed to shoot the president, not grab the throne ...”

“... can rarely have felt so personally implicated in a piece of writing. He doesn’t shy away from self-examination: his relationships with the key actors are made clear, as are his ethical dilemmas as a journalist, trying to maintain both political commitment and critical independence. It is a far more honest account of those difficulties than is ever given ...”

“... of the actual economy. The result is liberating in its overturning of a simplistic faith in the self-regulating perfection of free trade or flexible markets, but it also creates an opportunity for heterodox economists and disreputable policy entrepreneurs. Upholding the rigour and status of proper economics thus requires vigilant policing. Summers, for ...”

“... These men took on London, its sticky clay, its buried rivers and polluted air, its monumental self-interest and its blind faith in scientific progress. The original calculation was generous, tunnels constructed to accommodate a rising population. But hardly at the rate that transpired: London’s population doubled between the start of work in the 1850s ...”

“... for the players, and later died from gangrene: an allegory perhaps of Tár’s own remorseless self-devastation.In Lully’s time the orchestra was in its infancy. The Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roi was a crack ensemble, famous throughout Europe for its musical discipline and virtuosity, but it was something of an exception. For the kings and princes of the ...”

“... abaya. It turned out she was only a couple of months older than Wayne. But she was much more self-conscious, self-possessed. Being a girl, I guess. Girls grow up quicker than boys. Well, Ingie, that was her name, the woman’s I mean, chatted away – although you couldn’t really call it chatting since her English is ...”

“... be committed to housework. For people who can pay others to do that, voluntary work is a means of self-definition, a route to status, to MBE or DBE. One of several reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is rather a subversive writer is that much of his best work (he worked assiduously all his long life, and loved it) presents characters who don’t work and don’t mind ...”

“... religious and familial loyalties, weak internal communication, civil discord, or even conflicting self-definitions of membership, make it difficult if not impossible to establish a consistent and uncontroversial criterion for delineating their boundaries. But this need be no more of an impediment to the formulation of a theory of the evolution of societies ...”

“... This theory is a step towards the right answer, but taken alone it is absurd. Joyce was a self-important man, as he needed to be, and he had described Stephen in a book title as a portrait of himself when young: he would not trivialise the character without warning, in a continuation. Actually, the book confronts Stephen with a grim necessity: for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where he arrived at a therapeutic view of singing: good music was the objective, and painful self-discovery the process. Taking the Orpheus myth as a model, Wolfsohn asked his students to descend into themselves and retrieve the inspiration that had drawn them to singing in the first place (Orfeo ed Eurydice is one of several musical references in ...”