“... Sky in September 1949. Bowles’s method in The Sheltering Sky is to present three highly self-conscious American characters wandering freely in North Africa. He allows them to travel in search of some ineffable experience, away from the filth of Western culture, towards a strange, almost deadened sense of self. He ...”

“... a union organiser; he had published his poetry here and there; he would turn out to be a nuanced, self-conscious diarist, often introspective, self-mocking, good on the absurdities he encountered, and not always laconic under fire. He had an excellent eye for detail. At the same time he was brusque and untutored in his ...”

“... in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children down because of sudden work demands.’ She ignored the calls from Cook and the whips and went to the cinema. The boys hated ...”

“... the voice of Butler’s few but marvellous essays: laidback but crisp and clear, the voice of a self-confessed ‘news junkie’ and far-sighted African American intellectual who grew up through Project Mercury and the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for ...”

“... Stopping myself rejoining in order to react to this exceptional political event took considerable self-restraint. The moment I came closest to cracking wasn’t in response to the events themselves, though, but when I was tasked with managing my university department’s social media profile and came across this tweet by a prominent conservative ...”

“... as in a hospital or a prison (Solzhenitsyn’s The Third Circle). Or the island may be moral, self-constituted by a literary clique (Point Counter Point), by a group of like-thinking, semi-political bohemians (Les Chemins de la Liberté), by a cell of revolutionaries (Man’s Fate). What is involved is always a contest of faiths. The debates on the magic ...”

“... pedal extremities really are obnoxious.’ His is the compensatory pomposity of insecure, self-inflating people everywhere, from preachers to police who have just ‘apprehended the alleged perpetrator’. The highfalutin’ tag is mordant, too, if Waller intends to demonstrate that the shallow ‘lookist’ he’s playing, whose grammar is black ...”

“... death comes in the last paragraphs of Brave New World. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in the Surrey countryside: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’Why did ...”

“... to increase owners’ profits since the Luddites protested against mechanical looms. Airports have self check-ins; supermarkets have self check-outs; roads and bridges have, in place of toll-takers, technology that reads your licence plate. Customer service phone numbers connect you to digital operatives and a host of other ...”

“... Powers stresses – at somewhat inordinate length – Hoover thus inhabited an extremely narrow, self-satisfied and self-righteous little world. Even as a young man, he was conservative, respectable, a Freemason, and a keen, church-going, racial bigot, disliking all non-Wasps. Born in Washington, he went to school ...”

“... may recently have become a minority not simply because of demographics but because fewer people self-identify as white. The Serbs of Yugoslavia, the Sunnis of Iraq, the Muslim Moro of Mindanao and the Assamese of India are used as examples of ‘sons of the soil’ groups who feel they deserve better treatment than incomers and outsiders, and are psychic ...”

“... life. In the 1870s, Syed Ahmed Khan, pleading for compromise, warned Muslims that their self-imposed isolation would have terrible economic consequences. In the hope of encouraging them to abandon the religious schools where they were taught to learn the Koran by rote in a language they couldn’t understand, he established the Muslim Anglo-Oriental ...”

“... world beyond, of the art scene and its failures. Hughes brings out Auerbach’s persistence, his self-critical unease, the depth of his roots in the culture of painting, his allegeiance to drawing, the carnal presence of his work. A lesser critic might have made myths out of all this – the thick paint, the fanaticism, the terribilita. But there is a ...”

“... is not in any meaningful sense a war novel. It is an artistically artful vision of a child’s self-protective reaction to a life totally disrupted, in part fiction, yet only dubiously a novel. When J.G. Ballard decided to use the material of his early life as basis for a prose work (and the decision must have been difficult and painful), he must have ...”