“... was 16, to enrol at Duke University as a ‘desperately poor’ undergraduate, ‘romantically and self-indulgently lonely’. He graduated at the top of his class and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, graduating with a B.Litt, after writing the university’s first thesis on Joyce. When Kenner wrote to him in 1958 he was finishing a Harvard PhD on ...”

“... drift. Conversations are drained of meaning, running aground on her vagueness and her husband’s self-interested exasperation. She suspects Paul of an affair, and occasionally hints at mild displeasure, without summoning the energy for a confrontation. She writes to Jerry, an English guest who left a copy of George Meredith’s The Egoist in the ...”

“... to each other, as Randeep clings to Avtar, is just as likely to drag them down as save them. And self-sacrifice too often ends up doing more harm than good, to the people they are trying to help as well as to the martyrs themselves. Yet none of that means that there isn’t a right thing to do, or that they don’t feel guilty when they don’t do it. As the ...”

“... and queer theory to debates about sex work and anti-rape activism, major shifts in French sexual self-definition often transected with the figure of the ‘Arab’, and especially the ‘Arab man’. Arabs themselves – in France they were mostly North Africans – had a part in this conversation, though scarcely on equal terms. Shepard argues persuasively ...”

“... travel north of the border. They hate him there. Second, breaking the machinery of government is self-defeating for any political leader who wants to build a lasting legacy. The point of playing by the rules is that those rules are still in place to bind your successors. Ignoring them cuts the chain that links the present to the future. Nothing endures that ...”

“... was betrothed to the dauphin. Her portrait from c.1558, on loan from the Royal Collection, shows a self-assured young woman putting a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand: an allusion to her marriage, but also to her assumption of authority (over how many realms was open to question). In the reports of the Venetian ambassador, Mary is wilful and ...”

“... give up hope ... I’ve read two books by Baroness Von Sutton Pam and What became of Pam.’ The self-importance of the Anglican and Roman Catholic chaplains kept from her the cleric she had asked to see. Then, a few days after her 29th birthday, her appeal was turned down. Edith Thompson’s hair went grey; she had to be continually dosed with morphia. She ...”

“... the game to such an extent that he comes to forget that real chessboards exist. Yet he is just as self-interested as Czentovic: he needs chess to survive; but it nearly kills him. While the brute is able to use chess as his instrument of power, the intellectual finds himself nearly eaten alive from the inside out. That, of course, is what Zweig always feared ...”

“... development programme . . . I expected nothing from abroad . . . The emergence of India as a self-reliant country in the field of guided missiles upset all the developed nations of the world, but innovation cannot be suppressed by international restrictions . . . On the night of 15 January 1991, the Gulf War broke out between Iraq and the Allied Forces ...”

“... himself: ‘What should I do?’ He just sits there like a lump. Hesitation requires a level of self-consciousness that Parzival lacks. The equation of hesitation with inhibition leads to a rather limiting reading of Hamlet. Ziolkowski distinguishes between ‘hesitation’ – which happens at a ‘critical moment’ – and ‘delay’, which is a ‘more ...”

“... there was something that hearing or making music or both did for our likelihood of survival (or of self-preservation, or of transmitting our genes to posterity – different versions are in fashion from one decade to the next). And if it couldn’t be that we like music just for itself, then it couldn’t be that Neanderthals (or whatever) did either. Perhaps ...”

“... Then the tree is struck by a cannonball, and the fall from it kills him. The march is a self-sufficient society. ‘We have everything,’ one character says, ‘we meet every need.’ There are doctors and nurses, carpenters and engineers, musicians and servants, coffins and guns. It is a ‘floating world’, an ‘uprooted civilisation’, a ...”

“... of his Acquaintance’. The regulation of gentlewomen and ladies of quality was one of Nash’s self-imposed duties. He posed as Protector of the Fair, concerned that maiden virtue should not be rudely strumpeted in his domain. At the same time he set himself up as an overseer of the marriage market, ‘well placed’, as Eglin says, ‘to serve as either ...”

“... For example, unlike the Concerned Women for America, for whom pornography is at odds with their self-declared mission ‘to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens – first through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society – thereby reversing the decline in moral values in our nation’, MacKinnon has been a ...”

“... devotes considerable space to assuring us that attributing blame in Sri Lanka is not easy. And to self-conscious questioning of Westerners’ right to comment. ‘Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit,’ Gamini tells Anil at one point. The sudden winding up of the main story is followed by two sequences. The first is a clear-eyed, slow-motion account of a ...”