“... Abdullah, had already been imprisoned by the Indian authorities and Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nehru’s self-effacing successor, took the decisive course of widening the war. The adventure was a fiasco. A conventional army was thrown into unfamiliar territory with none of the logistical, ideological or political moorings essential to a successful guerrilla ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the comic and the adventurer, were diligently cultivated by Coryate – he was a great self-publicist – and both are expressed in his best-known book, Coryats Crudities, published in 1611. The Crudities gives an exhaustive account of his travels in Europe, but his long peregrinations in the East are more sparsely documented. His last extant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... narrative that, for an entire decade, deflected criticisms aimed at an appallingly inept and self-defeating policy. Despite the bitter protests of Cohen and a handful of his colleagues (such as Peter Reddaway and Jerry Hough), the mytho-poetic concept of ‘transition’ became, and to some extent remains, ‘a near orthodoxy’. Most Americans not only ...”

“... stutter and acute psoriasis, which he wrote about with bemused, clinical aplomb in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), he seemed to defy age and attrition, remaining nimble and smooth on the page, his brain a well-oiled Leica. With the exception of the still generative Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent pen-pal in the letters (and presiding grande dame of ...”

“... The other kind of class has the pupils reading The Diary of Anne Frank and trying their hands at self-portraits. This is a complete mess. It’s not just that the pupils are no good at the exercise. They are embarrassed and oppressed by it, and Marin doesn’t understand why they are being difficult. He manages to describe Souleymane’s digital photographs ...”

“... Simple societies and small communities, lacking this, need other ways of preventing resort to self-help and violence each time a dispute arises. Communal pressure on the parties to find a compromise is one way, akin to modern methods of mediation. Another is to encourage or permit the parties to find their own judge or judges and to agree to abide by ...”

“... have noted that Le Diable, probablement reverses the plot, such as it is, of Un condamné. The self-condemned young man does not escape but goes to his death by assisted suicide. Fontaine, the hero of Un condamné, is a French Resistance fighter arrested by the Germans in Lyon in 1943. We see him try to escape in the opening sequences of the movie; and see ...”

“... situation and the only way out – learning how to walk with a prosthesis, to drive and be self-sufficient again – is to keep a tight hold on Ariadne’s thread and follow where it leads. That means working meticulously at the physio and teaching myself to do things like type this article with my gangrenous fingers. I look out from my bed at the ...”

“... while she says: ‘The rabbi is busy.’ Larry, worried enough not to be his usual polite self, says: ‘He doesn’t look busy.’ Several months seem to pass. The receptionist says: ‘He’s thinking.’ The second sage, Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), nearly steals the movie, because of his air of infinite if never tested wisdom, and his grand ...”

“... who says to her daughter: ‘Daddy can’t be with us right now, he’s finding his inner self.’ Kaufman has plenty of satirical lines in this vein. An actress trying to cheer Cotard up with a bit of profound intellectual comfort says: ‘Knowing that you don’t know is the first essential step to knowing.’ Cotard, not intending any kind of ...”

“... concerns a splendidly promising young Hungarian cellist, Tibor, who is taken up by a woman, a self-proclaimed cello virtuoso, who means to teach him to be truly great. This she does without touching a cello herself. She is given a name (Eloise McCormack) and a habitation (Portland, Oregon, though she spends a lot of time in the most expensive hotel in ...”

“... and then of the Cyclops: ‘He does eat Odysseus’ men, but (anthropophagy apart) is this form of self-defence really so shocking?’ Well, yes, it is shocking: Homer makes it hard to get beyond the anthropophagy:    he reached for my companions caught up two together and slapped them,          like killing puppies, against the ...”

“... and suspects that ‘beneath his courteous exterior, this guy was full of nothing but conceit and self-admiration.’ In At Swim-Two-Birds the characters murder their creator (who is, in turn, fictional – Flann O’Brien doesn’t entirely succumb to sado-masochism) and then write their own novel in which he is brought back to life, tried and then ...”