“... in my adolescent female patients in Edinburgh, which occasionally lead to localised outbreaks of self-cutting, bulimia or anorexia.) O’Sullivan asks a young Nicaraguan man why women are so often the victims, not men: ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but I think maybe the girls are weak and grisi siknis makes them strong.’ O’Sullivan agrees, and notes ...”

“... others. Egan’s second novel, Look at Me, fits into this category: Charlotte, an impetuous, self-obsessed model left unrecognisable after a car crash, sells the rights to her life story, and later her identity, to the founder of Ordinary People, a website that hosts individualised pages (called PersonalSpaces) with ‘Photographs … Childhood ...”

“... some of us, its low point remains the National Gallery’s Grandes Baigneuses, a vast, wearisomely self-reproaching snarl-up of ochres and Prussian blue. In this painting, a sexagenarian scrabbles after an organising logic to his receding sensual dreams, whereas in Bibémus Quarry his handiwork feels exuberant, shimmering with the surprise of direct plein air ...”

“... the ‘rudimentary communism’ of the village, lingered awkwardly in an early modern world of self-interest and long-distance trade. The desire for abundance and autonomy will probably outlive the factory farm and the oil rig. All the more reason, then, to pay attention to the relationship between ideas and the material realities they addressed, ignored ...”

“... of God’. Both, presumably, were also men of themselves, Fisher as slightly fussy and self-important, Ramsey in the more engaging way of following his own devices, appearing unconcerned about his many oddities and, to an extent unusual in high office, keeping silent when he felt like it. After Repton Ramsey went to Magdalene College, Cambridge ...”

“... if conversationally. ‘Was it you who took it?’ ‘I’ve never robbed you before,’ he says self-righteously, and goes into the other room. She turns my purse upside down over the couch, sending a cascade of junk onto the clean upholstery. Sitting on the arm of the couch, she sifts through the crumbling map, the little bottles, the twisted ...”

“... Othello’s big speech to be a rather high-flown but timely and militarily justified piece of self-commendation. Othello, so far from being regarded as a vain and dangerous intruder, is so trusted a soldier that he is chosen at the moment of crisis to defend Cyprus and Christendom against the Turk. The point is simply that he had accessible ...”

“... F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was launched. ‘Criticism’ was no longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second issue, Leavis published an article that asked: ‘What’s wrong with Criticism?’ Desmond ...”

“... deserting her husband during Katherine’s childhood: now she provides the funds for Katherine, self-exiled in Spain, one ‘bolter’ subsidising another. The old lady takes Katherine for a holiday in Portugal: the mother seems very conscious of herself as being a lady among the locals, a settler among the natives. She had been somewhat ...”

“... both Gibreel and Saladin, as well as those of Philip II, speak more vividly than can those of the self-centred, sin-and-salvation-centred characters of Graham Greene, precisely because they are anchored in both ancient and modern history, with its migrations and regenerating mixtures. All the books I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed ...”

“... are of remarkably even quality and interest,’ for Woolf seems to have been an exceptionally self-consistent man, a man of integrity, if that expression is still, in post-modern times, permissible. Of course it might be that the selection has been made to reinforce this opinion of him – for Spotts is a great admirer, though he does go out of his way to ...”

“... question: ‘Could the man of parts live without grocers?’ The radical aesthetic of O’Nolan is self-destructive. In his fiction the most intense imagination is a regressive condition of the dead and of the damned. The abyss of selfhood (der selbe) becomes a comedy of footnotes and of policemen. De Selby and McCruiskeen: fantastic, jaunty and ...”

“... count because there wasn’t enough action from below or blood in the streets, or there wasn’t a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard which plotted and led the masses towards a chosen destination. Still, I don’t meet anybody who doubts that these are the greatest changes of our lives: the end of the war that has lasted since before most of us can ...”

“... whom Lord David Cecil declared to be ‘a great man’, yet who seems to have had only a minimal self-knowledge and who had a capacity for getting things ‘plumb wrong’ in human relationships. It was certainly a man of unusual talent who produced some sixty books, including English Literature in the 16th Century, excluding Drama, the famous books of ...”

“... fecoventilatory collision’, which alone of the words I have cited seems to be more or less self-explanatory, unless you know Greek, Japanese and the presumably upmarket slang to which the dictionary refers in defining ‘mopery’. This lexical work is not the only trial of the reader’s education or ingenuity. One has also to guess what it means, for ...”