“... nearly molested, aged five, on a beach, by a wavy-haired stranger. Her well-developed sense of self enables the narrative, for the most part, to zip along. She has delivered parts of the book as a very enjoyable, sometimes dazzling one-woman show (I saw her last year at the Bath Literary Festival), and at times – particularly in the delightful early ...”

“... the Chinese hadn’t wanted to smoke the stuff, it would not have gone on. China’s wounds were self-inflicted. ‘Worms only appear in a rotten carcass,’ was how one man put it in the 1860s. This seems to have been the usual Chinese reaction to the Opium Wars for years afterwards. ‘If a people is dispirited and stupid,’ Yan Fu wrote half a century ...”

“... Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain ...”

“... go to Versailles, where the peace conference was taking place, and argue the case for Vietnamese self-rule. One of Woodrow Wilson’s aides met him briefly, but self-determination was a privilege restricted to Europeans (though not Germans). He looks awkward in the photograph taken at Versailles, a sleek, well-dressed ...”

“... to be a Finn called Sampo Karjalainen, and is sent to Finland to try to recover his former self. The weather is freezing and the grammar confounding. The novel is an amalgam of conversations half understood, relationships thwarted and lonely bus journeys. But it also gives a glimpse of what seems to have been a much happier experience of ...”

“... or Belgium, the process was smooth and friendly. Britain, so the story went, was freely granting self-government to its colonies as the culmination of imperial rule, which had always had this as its ultimate aim – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the history books used to put it. If for no other reason, the myth was needed in order to make ordinary ...”

“... policy,’ he said in a radio interview that same year. Ogilvie describes such statements as ‘self-promotion’. ‘This is not to ascribe mendacity to Burchfield,’ she insists, yet ‘his claims for what he had done … simply were not true.’ She is not accusing him of what the OED defines as ‘the tendency or disposition to lie or deceive’, but ...”

“... concept of his science of roughness. What are fractals? The short answer is mathematical models of self-similarity and self-resemblance: objects whose parts mimic the whole. Natural examples abound: a cauliflower is made up of florets, or miniature cauliflowers, each of which in turn is composed of smaller florets, and so ...”

“... age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to resurrect it at the end of the session, ready for another vanishing tomorrow, or when he feels like it. Flora and Philip are married, and ...”

“... and Cicero, both of whom came from towns enfranchised earlier in the Republic. Their numbers and self-confidence increased dramatically after the universal enfranchisement of 91-89. Claiming virtues more authentically Roman than those of the old nobility, they started to make it into the Senate in sizeable numbers only in the Augustan age. Members of this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... point keeps recurring, a time when, as Dorothy is told, we ceased to take things for granted and self-interest and self-servingness took over. Some of this alteration in public life can be put down to the pushing back of the boundaries of the state as begun under Mrs Thatcher and pursued even more disastrously ...”

“... after blow from ‘authorities’ who dismiss her work: an art teacher at high school savaged a self-portrait; her work at art school was given an equally cold reception. Then there was the creative writing class she signed up to, at which she was obliged to read her story right after a successful Hollywood scriptwriter read his. ‘OK,’ the teacher, who ...”

“... less of a stabilising force than they seem. Deadpan yet tongue in cheek, they constantly slip into self-mockery and teasing. ‘Some of my most classic cases,’ Holmes says, ‘have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley ...”

“... river. Mabey’s essays, which begin from his own experience, are sometimes Schama-like in their self-indulgence, sometimes useful oral history, as in his accounts of managing his own small wood and of the great storm of 1987. He gives a lively if brief account of the economic history of the Chilterns and ecological history of the New Forest, and sets about ...”