“... place in society in general carried out, as usual among the Stracheys, in a more high-pitched and self-conscious form, was the family’s departure from the monstrous house in Lancaster Gate. Richard Strachey had died in 1908, and the ‘crammed high hideous edifice’ where Lytton had read ‘the riddle of the Victorian age’ among the conversations in the ...”

“... was peculiarly a product of its time. Her childhood in Rome was marked by a spirit of defiance and self-dramatisation, and a growing desire to re-create herself as something brilliant against the solid, somewhat dreary backdrop of her parents’ respectable social round. She dressed up in old clothes she found in the attics of the Palazzo Corsini, and became ...”

“... mean’. Malinowski did not dissent, or doubt that the Trobrianders were much like everyone else. Self-reflection and observation fed off each other, yielding not only aversion and self-disgust but also new insights. ‘What is the deepest essence of my investigations? To discover what are [the native’s] main ...”

“... charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5. In Search of ...”

“... Herefordshire hills. I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own. Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s self-portrait in blank verse, was published in 1960. As Hillier puts it, neatly: ‘John’s generation was given to premature ...”

“... as a leering parasite. The reviewers agreed on three things. Maschler had written an absurdly self-important memoir. But he was, they reluctantly conceded, a very important publisher. It was not mere hype to label him, as the blurb did (concocted, presumably, by Maschler), ‘the most important publisher in Britain’. Third, it was generally implied, he ...”

“... terms of our dutiful conformity to a universal law. For them, experience in the form of desire or self-interest is usually what gets in the way of doing the right thing. It would be possible to construct something like a grand narrative of experience from the components of Jay’s book, though he is far too sensible to do so himself. The medieval ...”

“... the ideal scientist from the person of Richard Feynman. It was a very public persona: theatrical, self-consciously paradoxical, both naive and faux naive, seemingly spontaneous and confessional but artfully prepared and always reserving something of himself from the public domain. The hand-waving, the shifting from foot to foot, the rapid-fire ...”

“... buoyant one – which compounded even his new comrades’ distrust of him. He seemed to have a self-destructive streak. From early on, we are told, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny, invulnerable to bullets both literally (in his early military adventures) and metaphorically; but that was no reason, surely, to put himself in the path of so many ...”

“... institutions of this kind or even by repatriation and return. They were in the end reflexive, self-referential structures, and would be undermined by dispossession, struggle and unending loss. Like a Conradian hero, Ibrahim seemed always to be trying to rescue meaning and pride from the dramas going on around him, as well as from his own ...”

“... Again, what do all these men see in this guy? Obviously for some it’s a sharing of financial self-interest; for others it’s a relief that a good ol’ boy can still be elected President; for others it’s the moral mumbo-jumbo about ‘integrity in the White House’ that does the trick. Maybe also at work is the ‘Harold Carswell factor’, which I ...”

“... is awkward in a novel that narrates surreal happenings, Spark’s recourse to a theoretical or self-conscious realism is no solution either. For one thing, it is still a form of realism: we are still asked to believe that characters ‘exist’, that certain things happened to these people, that quotation-marks signify certain lines of speech, and so ...”

“... papers would report another classic white African murder: drunken father kills wife, children, self. Carolyn Slaughter and Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs of ‘an African childhood’ try, indirectly, to explain how generations of white people who ‘knew what was best for their Africans’ got it so wrong. Before the Knife and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs ...”

“... through ordinary political action. But what it has done has not interfered much with democratic self-governance.’ What most matters, he concludes, is who gets put on the bench, and I’ll return to this. Oddly for a book about the United Kingdom, what none of the essays in this book addresses is the pivotal relationship between the European Court of Human ...”

“... hard on moral offences relating to prostitution and drunkenness. And there also emerged the self-employed ‘thief-catcher’ – the most celebrated was Jonathan Wild, immortalised by Fielding. Such self-appointed sleuths cashed in on the lavish Parliamentary rewards newly offered for those bringing successful ...”