“... opinions about the state of the game etc, all while I just sat there. Damn. So I go upstairs and self-righteously listen to the game on the radio. Sri Lanka are all out for 162. 31 May. France 0 Senegal 1 in the opening match. This is officially the biggest shock of all time, though the previous winners have in fact won the opening game only twice in the ...”

“... created a more fictional character than the researching “I” in my doctorate,’ he wrote, ‘a self that begins in pretended ignorance and then slowly arrives at knowledge, not at all in the fitful, chancy way I myself arrived at it, but step by step, proof by proof, according to the rules.’ The trilogy opens with Bänkpress (1988), so far untranslated ...”

“... Saudi-protecting demeanour of the Texas oil barons, shocking though all that is, but the everyday self-certainty that makes America a fighting force against other cultures and ways of life.3 The delegates have breathed a lot of this stuff into their lungs in recent years, but they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a ...”

“... need, to purchase goods as a token sacrifice against the hazards of travel. Leaving an older self behind, rooted, watching as you walk away, involves an element of risk. Stations are non-denominational places of worship, staffed by preoccupied disbelievers. The laws of time and space are different here. The narrator of The War of the Worlds strolls down ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... account as a complex if partial portrait of a man: incomplete, tendentious, unreliable, at times self-contradictory – but whose biography isn’t? Julius Caesar emerges from Suetonius’ portrait (as from other sources, including his own writings) as a man who liked to move fast and break things, who possessed both the means and the inclination to conquer ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”