“... view of metaphor is not only rooted in the history that I’ve just outlined, but is also self-consciously Catholic. In his first chapter he describes puzzling over the metaphors he encountered in the Latin liturgy and in the hymns of St Thomas Aquinas when he was an altar boy in Warrenpoint, County Down in the 1930s. He tried to grasp how the Virgin ...”

“... the emergence of behavioural economics, which acknowledges that humans are not only or not always self-interested utility-maximisers (Amartya Sen described homo economicus as a ‘rational fool’), but social, moral and emotional animals too; studies of economic ‘irrationality’ now proliferate. Experts and the market are no longer seen to be alternatives ...”

“... Party (your in-group), then anything an environmentalist (your out-group) tells you is going to be self-evidently wrong, regardless of its factual content – and vice versa. Research carried out in Norway, and Marshall’s own work in Texas, demonstrates that even when people have lived through unprecedented wildfires and snowmelt they maintain an ...”

“... the Islamic State astonished its enemies by sweeping through Iraq’s second city, Mosul, the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a mosque to give a victory speech. When he raised his right arm to emphasise a point, the sleeve of his black robe fell back to reveal what some on social media identified as a Rolex watch. Online ...”

“... being no one’s sleep under so many/lids’, the sheer peevishness, the withdrawal, the implicit self-adulation, the up-yours-even-unto-the-elbow-and-from-beyond-the-grave of these great souls, Heaney’s (I don’t know what it says on his grave) admirable humanity and unfathomable kindness become even more striking. His rare sense ‘of being here for good ...”

“... his own books of perfect poems for more than fifty years. A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’ And ...”

“... my species.’ In the context it seems invigorating. Michaels’s writing also seems more open to self-mockery. Sylvia sends the narrator out to the drugstore for Tampax, in order, he suspects, to humiliate him: ‘I dreaded the man at the counter, who would think I was an exceptionally bizarre Village transvestite. I asked for Tampax in a hoodlum-ish ...”

“... they were just trying to make it good. There’s plainly a large investment of the writer’s self in these eloquent inhabitings. It’s accompanied by a sympathetic awareness of the subjects’ flaws. We’re left in little doubt about the revenge-of-the-nerds reasoning behind Braben and Bell’s other lives as student Thatcherites, just as Spufford’s ...”

“... sustained Catholic counter-position, something supple and sophisticated, that was not simply about self-serving efforts by desperate men who would do or write anything to denounce Elizabeth or the mob of heretics (Cecil chief among them) she had appointed to advise her. Lake sees ‘political thought’ not so much as a canon of texts admired for their ...”

“... title might as well as have been a message from Washington via Hollywood to Tehran.Why would a self-professed liberal like Ben Affleck – who majored in Middle East studies – show such insensitivity? The main reason, many scholars would argue, is Orientalism. When Edward Said elaborated his critique of Western scholarship about the ‘East’ in ...”

“... horror, psychological realism and fantasy, the stories are written in a smug tone that recalls a self-professed neurotic on a first date cheerfully outlining his adolescent traumas and the ensuing ‘issues’. (A couple of the stories are centred on such a guy, to grating effect.) The lack of mystery isn’t terrible, just deflating, and a little ...”

“... interpretation made by long-retired officials (not by constitutional judges), Japan’s self-defence forces relied fully on American support in the event of combat, but were forbidden to provide any support whatever to US forces. As I noted to some of Abe’s officials at the time, had this fact been known to the American public it would have ...”

“... anticipate the rise of political parties: indeed, they were anxious to avoid them as divisive and self-interested. The constitution originally provided that voters would choose presidential electors from among their most well-informed neighbours of independent judgment, and that each elector would cast two votes for president, with the second-place finisher ...”

“... in humility, for it would be unbearable if they did.’ Instead, he jests, they should stand up in self-defence like the Wife of Bath, ‘fierce as a tiger in India’. But Chaucer was not writing a conduct book, any more than the author of Le Ménagier de Paris aimed to provoke a sophisticated courtly debate. Rather, Le Ménagier interprets Griselda’s tale ...”

“... about serious and repeated sexual harassment, racist abuse and bullying’, Philip Green gave a self-congratulatory interview to the Guardian. Swaggering through his high-street stores, journalist in tow, he showed off his knowledge of the stock, his attention to product display, his grace while accepting customers’ compliments, and his perspicacity in ...”