“... to the offices of the firm of solicitors where she worked. My mother was her stylish, professional self. A short while after that, when she was 60, she had a severe, paralysing stroke. But at that last telling, I understood. I had by then stood in the doorway of a baby’s room, leaned over a cot, and listened for the small, blessed exchange of air in his new ...”

“... Sir Denis Wright, Mayers’s successor in Mersin, O’Neill learns that contrary to his family’s self-presentation as pillars of Turkish society, the Syrians were in fact ‘disliked, mistrusted and envied by the Turks because of their origin, their religion and their wealth . . . the flashiness of their behaviour and their group instinct’. The ...”

“... of the starry heavens. But already by the Sixties and Seventies a new presentation of scientific self began to circulate. James Watson radically confessed that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working hard on the structure of DNA; Richard Feynman enjoyed having himself photographed playing the bongos, and, like Kary Mullis, broadcast his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is ignoble because he does not stand up for himself and his own. The assertiveness required of a self-respecting man was frowned on in slaves and women. Medea’s vengefulness was all the more terrible for being the expression of womanly rage. (A goddess’s anger is beyond condemnation, like a storm at sea.) To call the non-angry man ‘slavish’ is itself ...”

“... and gulfs, was to the author of Oceans never clear or never considered. Forewords are so often self-serving that I tend to skip them, hoping to hold on to some regard for the writer at least until after the first pallid pages of his book have slipped away into the ‘nevermore to be remembered’. Their premature celebrations of genius are usually a ...”

“... to two hours. ‘Perhaps nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian (1931). Perhaps nothing Muldoon has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance as his attempt to present in A-Z form the ...”

“... of human emotion, passion, disgust and other affective manifestations of the ‘interior’ self. In Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth Century Art and Fiction, David Trotter, the author of several other books about 19th-century writers, proposes what he calls ‘mess-theory’ (and, as a corollary, ‘litter-theory,’ which he regards as ...”

“... Gandhi?’ ‘No, Kasturbabai Gandhi’, embarrassing all by invoking the Mahatma’s small, self-effacing, long dead wife – was seen in the stands, sitting next to Marshneill Gavaskar, grinning because she could see herself on television. She smiled; and waved – at whom, no one, among the millions watching, knew. During the 35th over, by which time ...”

“... preferment, he seems to have known from his thirties on that he was likely to become Pope, and as self-confidence grew into certainty, he developed a feline narcissism, a self-conscious and often exhibitionist piety. As a precocious Papal nuncio in Germany, he had the bad luck to run headlong into the terror of the 1919 ...”

“... Many are written but few survive. They are too often catalogues of games lost and won, or merely self-congratulatory. And they only rarely connect to the wider world. Addicted, however, emphatically connects to the wider world. For this book, as is now well known, is about two addictions: football and drink – and both are treated with remarkable ...”

“... seems to play an important role. Instead, it offers a window onto the remarkable battles between self-confident scientific dogmas which raged across Europe at the end of the 19th century – and which continue today. When professional scientists write books about past heroes, they often have a contemporary aim in view. Cercignani is no exception. He is an ...”

“... it.’ Again, the interest of the book is in these field reports, but it also lies in Seabrook’s self-analysis, as he graphs this ‘tectonic shift’ in culture on the fly. What are the bearings that Seabrook takes? Even though he is a self-declared ‘hegemonoculous’ (a wonderful-horrible appellation meant as a homage ...”

“... their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic self-satisfaction.’ Moreover, the multicultural Davies crows, none of them gained a reputation outside the English-speaking world. They were mired in a mental framework that simply could not conceive of a world which did not place the greatest ...”

“... me that most of the people I’ve talked to from this kind of lunatic background incline towards self-pity and self-abuse. There’s a loneliness involved in survival, in the kind of class-changing that involves disowning, and in some way despising one’s own family and saying, at least for a while: I hate you, I’ll ...”