“... down there with those of Topeka, Kansas, Madison, Wisconsin and Baton Rouge, Louisiana: bigoted, self-dealing, stupidity to the power of anything-you-like, manifesting urgency and savoir faire only where it really doesn’t matter) into the next slump. ‘The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near,’ as the navy brat Jim Morrison sang (born in ...”

“... executive and a model of stable governance. Crucially, it recognised the inevitability of Algerian self-determination. In these fundamental respects, the Fifth Republic did indeed appear to be a break with the past. But, as Chapman explains, Algeria also enabled the state to refine the art of population management. The Algerian migrant population in France ...”

“... it seems to me, is what the memoir is all about: the difficulty Sibylle has in breaking with a self defined by her father’s absence. Magisterial and unkind as Lacan could be, his name doesn’t weigh too heavily on her – it wasn’t until she was 21 that she was asked whether she was ‘the daughter of’. Her feelings of inadequacy, her dislike of ...”

“... is a key to this anthology’s account of the long tradition of scepticism about exorcism. A self-important but credulous parish priest is tricked into performing an exorcism by tall tales of an unlaid ghost and buried treasure; there are mysterious lights, wailing and even a letter from the gratefully exorcised soul in purgatory. The tale also provides ...”

“... never seen why Sartre should have been praised for inverting and falsifying this truism), and the self-important spongers of Venice no more so than the rest.By this time one is yearning for the stubborn But against which all these sequent waves of fairmindedness will go up in foam. Larkin’s timing is perfect, and his But of a sentence is petrified into a ...”

“... 1953), who are just trying to get through an averagely selfish day, as committed to ‘absolutely self-centred fantasies of a world in which reality has been suspended in one’s own favour’. It’s true that these people, who are us (‘At this hour we all might be anyone’), are about to take part in the Crucifixion, but our shallowness rather than any ...”

“... her own. Still, if she did not shower these particular scintillating adjectives on her flapper-self, her life proclaimed them. A flapper in the 1920s, like a post-feminist today, hovers between defiance and compliance. She embraces the subordination the previous generation fled, but calls it ‘brave and gay and beautiful’, not ...”

“... and which could have been both profound and funny, just becomes a mildly embarrassing exercise in self-indulgence. Like any other early modern philosopher acting on a public stage, Descartes helped build his own monument, and it isn’t at all obvious that he would have been displeased with the hagiographic commentary that developed not only after his life ...”

“... He appears to have started off with good intentions. At their first meeting he told Hastings self-deprecatingly that ‘any newspaper that attempted to impose my convictions on its readership would be in danger of possessing a circulation of one.’ But if this was a sincere commitment to the notion of editorial independence it did not last long. A few ...”

“... you know. They’re thugs’), just setting out a bowl of milk. When Otto accuses her of self-indulgence, she replies: ‘I don’t care why I’m doing it. The point is that I can see it starving.’ So when the cat shows up that evening, Sophie caresses its back: She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human ...”

“... fickle, less hopeless, that the loss is not their own fault. But it’s always best to doubt such self-serving conclusions. Generally, things are one’s fault, unless it can be positively proved otherwise. Anyway, sit me in front of Bringing Up Baby, The Wild Bunch or The Conversation and I’m ravished. It’s not the films I love that I’ve fallen out of ...”

“... before him, portrays himself as a representative of these places and their cosmology, an act of self-invention as bold as that of any renamed outlaw. Reagan went from the Midwest to Hollywood; Bush is a product of East Coast privilege, even if he did go to flat, dry Midlands, Texas, to cultivate his insularity and a failed oil business. For more than a ...”

“... have been the main characters. The parents are, without exception, chronically unhappy and self-obsessed (in The Rules of Attraction, ‘The Freshman band is called The Parents – that’s enough to send out some message to people’s feelers that something wrong is going down’). And the childhood memories that occur fleetingly throughout the novels ...”

“... No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an architecture of great panache, with sleek surfaces, usually of metal and glass, luminous spaces, often open in plan, and suave profiles that can also ...”

“... a victory. This was not just one more Soviet town, a Kharkov or an Orel. But once again we see the self-defeating nature of the Nazi approach to war. At the outset the German army had cost itself the sympathies of millions of Ukrainians by treating them as subhuman; it now fell victim to a huge pincer movement extending west of Stalingrad because of its ...”