“... users.’ So now I was the troll? Me, with my burner, my bugging device, my fake account and my self-righteous mission? It was an outrage.The advice from my publishers was just to move on. It was not worth the effort required to get these kinds of account taken down. But I was already in too deep. I started up another, different, fake Instagram account ...”

“... as punishment for ‘being herself – not the dutiful wife or somebody’s mother, but her real self, stubbornly content’. Deep down he fears losing her to the invisible force he imagines is taking over the women in the community. This is also why he ties up his daughter, Julie, before locking her in a cupboard: ‘All this was only to protect them ...”

“... the can-can in La Boutique fantasque – were no longer in touch; she thought he was ambitious and self-centred. But her personality on stage had helped shape Massine’s conception of what was possible in dance. She showed me a photograph on the mantelpiece: it was of a drawing depicting herself and Massine dancing the can-can, inscribed: ‘Pour Lydia en ...”

“... her now-or-never haste and her ill-lit parlours, barns and school corridors, she is a model of the self-taught photographer. But when Sinéty fetched up in Poilley, she had already studied painting and drawing at the elite Arts Deco in Paris. She had recently got hold of a Nikon single lens reflex camera and was keeping copious notes on the results of her ...”

“... appeared in the New York Times. Most of the Beats, Kerouac included, were out for nihilistic self-destructive fun of a kind which, as forecast by their elder statesman Kenneth Rexroth, implied the abandonment of all civilised values, and their own early deaths. Ginsberg was different. He really was looking for a mystical truth that might be reached ...”

“... Soldier inexplicably fussy. Ford’s quite copious poetry can also put one off by its seemingly self-indulgent lack of concentration, but Pound gave reasons for admiring it. In this country Ford has enjoyed the advocacy of Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, but the busiest and also the most effective of Ford’s admirers have been American. Though Carcanet ...”

“... can relate to their oppressors as equals. Mandela’s demeanour and discourse display a pride and self-confidence that equal those of his oppressors. He even learned their despised language – but not to gain entry as a colonised subject. Black consciousness, as a sense of identity that has rid itself of the inferiority complex of an internalised slave ...”

“... go into detail: it is Steinberg’s task to elaborate. A curious mix of ‘prestige, humanity and self-interest’, he finds, ‘fused in the Italian determination’ not to go along. Perhaps primarily ‘it had become a matter of ... honour ... the last shred of honour left’ in a war Italy was losing. And, most curiously, this resistance ‘was carried out ...”

“... saying that aid is patronising and useless. He insists that it is harmful, both to Third World self-sufficiency and to the environment. I have little doubt that many of those who have worked in Africa, inside and outside the aid business, will find themselves nodding sadly but vigorously in agreement. It is not just the old story of a benevolent concept ...”

“... misreadings – for instance, his dismissive remarks about Karl Kraus (as epitome of ‘Jewish self-hatred’). For many readers Reich-Ranicki was far too opinionated. It was difficult, as Böll observed, to discern the criteria which led him to praise one book and damn another. These same merits and limitations are evident in Thomas Mann and his ...”

“... in my heart, even if it meant my resorting from time to time to the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse. And on Godsmiths: And I would never do my bees the wrong I had done my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body. True, in reverting to 1955 I am remembering me, but that doesn’t mean I am not ...”

“... In novelist’s terms, did she do right or wrong? Daisy is described as summoning up her ‘stone self’ so that even her brain becomes transparent – ‘you can hold it up to the window and the light shines through. Empty, though, there’s the catch.’ She is shown as breathing her own death and contriving it, taking charge of it, in fact, as though in ...”

“... dump sites operated on behalf of the municipality by a contractor. The scavengers on the dumps are self-employed sub-contractors who sell recyclable materials to the contractor. Nice technical language. The dump, when we reach it, fills the horizon, acres of it, fifty metres or so high, a mountainous smoking badlands with a sheer cliff-edge looming above the ...”

“... the proposition ‘that no one has a monopoly on truth,’ there is perhaps something innately self-defeating about this structure, which effectively mounts its defence of stereotype-free pluralism by categorising and burning large numbers of heretics. But some such contradiction is probably inevitable given Vickers’s extraordinary level of confidence in ...”

“... drew on Greek myth for his interpretations. After brooding about the beleaguered tragic self, it is a relief to turn to a book that considers one of the ancient Greeks’ most attractive concepts, charis, the grace or pleasure that results from mutual exchange. Bonnie MacLachlan shows, with a light touch appropriate to her subject, that the term can ...”