“... libertinage and Catholic mysticism. Binet casts Sollers as a childishly boastful, histrionically self-involved buffoon who tirelessly spews either free-associative prose-poetry or monologues about, say, Americans’ amazing obliviousness to Derrida’s debt to his novel Numbers (1966), ‘which no one in New York or California has ever bothered to ...”

“... it ‘ruinously flawed’. The usual explanation for the split between O’Nolan’s all-out self-confidence and his air of anxious insecurity – a mixture of ‘fretfulness and swagger’, as Maebh Long puts it – is that it was a consequence of his failure to find a publisher for The Third Policeman. By 1941, when he turned thirty, O’Nolan had ...”

“... was tragically limited, and though that seemed doubly enraging, it’s axiomatic. A degree of self-delusion may be essential in sexual acts that are so disproportionate, and a lack of empathy for the victim is key to every kind and style of sexual assault. Also, of course, some of the men weren’t sorry: it was too hard to be sorry when it seemed as ...”

“... Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had led IS since 2010, in a US raid in north-west Syria was celebrated in a self-glorifying speech by Donald Trump as proof that IS had been definitively destroyed. The claim had some substance: al-Baghdadi, who five years earlier had declared himself caliph in the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, was the most important surviving symbol of IS as ...”

“... returned from its Babylonian captivity in Avignon, Rome was a shadow of its ancient imperial self. Perhaps twenty thousand people lived in a city built for a million. Sheep grazed on the Forum, where the great dramas of the Republic had been staged, and on the hills, where warlords and emperors had built their palaces. The streets were no longer ...”

“... Fonda, say. Fonda acted once in Omaha with Marlon’s mother. Could Brando have been so calm, self-effacing and available to us as Fonda is in 12 Angry Men? Could he have played the chump in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve without angling for sympathy? There has always been a strain of American acting that is resolute, simple and content to trust a known ...”

“... concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won.One of the things Johnson wanted, and blamed the NRA for not letting him get, was a national registry of all the guns in the country. NRA lobbying was still in its infancy, but when ...”

“... admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing, self-deprecating self-portrait: in the universe that Herron has created in his Slough House series, the headquarters of one of Britain’s intelligence agencies is ‘the Park’ rather than ‘the Fairground’ or, as in le ...”

“... will endow them with that which is beyond all human science and reveal to them God’s very self.’ To that end she unilaterally hired a professor of personal ethics, Reverend Hepworth, who preached that ‘the departed are nearer to us, very much nearer than we dare think.’ The Darwinian ichthyologist was not happy with any of this, but he kept his ...”

“... Klein lived in the city and visited the school in 1925 – Isaacs encouraged curiosity and self-expression, characteristics she believed were clouded by adults’ confusion of moral and causal categories (a confusion they later attributed to the ‘primitive’ minds of children). When the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget told a child he must ...”

“... of a single, all-representative ‘Negro’. His mother, Carrie, was by all accounts feckless and self-absorbed, and often left him in the care of his grandmother or family friends, while his father departed for Mexico soon after Langston was born. Just before writing ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, Hughes had been pondering his father’s ‘strange ...”

“... Pan-Africanism’. A better term, he thought, was ‘neo-sovereigntism’: an absolutist model of self-government with zero interference by external forces. For Mbembe, African neo-sovereigntism is a rhetoric of entrenchment and a reaction against disempowerment. Its origins lie in a series of reversals that began in the 1980s when structural adjustment bit ...”

“... was given the impression that ‘your Virginia thinks me all right,’ and she made strenuous self-effacing efforts to accommodate the other lovers and ex-lovers who orbited Sackville-West. After two years or so, Sackville-West moved on. The relationship faded out. In 1938 she published ‘Solitude’, a poem that reflected her ability to engage love ...”

“... became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and the movement offered them a way to universalise their early political commitment. They took part in ...”

“... relation thought Aunt Jane could have accepted him only while suffering ‘a momentary fit of self-delusion’. It is possible that Bigg-Wither’s sisters encouraged him to make the proposal to their friend; Austen might, like Charlotte, have decided on reflection that his professed ‘attachment to her must be imaginary’.Yet Charlotte’s ...”