“... as wholly and irrefutably obvious. A better title might have been How These Truths Became Self-Evident, because that is the problem that actually concerns her (she starts with Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence). As she notes, between 1689, when the Bill of Rights spoke only of the particular rights of Englishmen, and 1776, when Jefferson ...”

“... taste for the sublime is a greed like any other.’ But the occasional mockery she makes of her self-consciously self-forgetting absorptions seems mere stylistic dither and does not touch her essential seriousness. Though her reader may flip ahead, may put down the book and forget where she left off, may allow herself to ...”

“... by mouth’. During police questioning, Eric comes under suspicion: the cops mistake his self-loathing for guilt. In scenes told almost entirely in (often very funny) dialogue, he doesn’t help himself by being unable to disguise how much he despised the victim: ‘Sometimes it feels like everybody I know down here went to the same fucking art camp ...”

“... polite society accepted the open-mouthed smile. Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun’s ‘Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie’ (1786). Wariness of the laugh (le rire) among classical and religious authorities had cast a shadow of disapproval over its diminutive, the smile (le sourire). Aristotle may have noted that laughing distinguished mankind ...”

“... their lives, and objective analysis often takes second place to the resurrected details (revealing self-made success, lost grandeur, anti-authoritarian spirit or helpless victimhood) that best confirm the values of the investigator. Trained historians observe, sometimes disdainfully, that such researchers are looking for archival comfort food. The two breeds ...”

“... are plain-living, selfless and even saintly, while others are envious, untrustworthy and self-seeking. Some anti-egalitarians are greedy, complacent and callous, while others are open-handed, fair-minded and genuinely committed to the well-being of their dependants and subordinates. But that commonplace observation is no help in the quest for a ...”

“... that Church doctrine and social custom imposed on sexuality drew especially vigorous criticism. Self-proclaimed libertines rejected constraints on premarital virginity and conjugal fidelity, heterosexuality and monogamy, chastity in women and chivalry in men. Evolving from the mid-century contributions of Diderot and Crébillon fils, libertine fiction ...”

“... and the schizophrenia disproportionately experienced by the area’s migrants. Migration is a self-splitting, one note observes; it’s ‘psychotic to live in a different country for ever’. In 2012, Kapil returned to the UK and lay down near the house in Lansbury Drive, Hayes, where she grew up. From pavement level, she could sense the weird electric ...”

“... recourse to the I Ching and interviews with friends who are mothers.The ceaseless metaphysical self-inquiry of Heti’s books is a maddening, but accurate, depiction of a world in which one cannot boil an egg or clean a toilet or get married without wondering whether there might be a more optimal way of doing it explained in a video on the internet. Heti ...”

“... not methodologically sound. Its prose glittered meretriciously. Even worse, it was entertaining. Self-evidently, it was bad history. Believing that they knew what constituted correct and appropriate history, they could only respond to what they saw as deviance dismissively, to innovations from abroad with insular suspicion. As academic history contracts in ...”

“... Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious ...”

“... stories, will be a match for him, but even she falls away in the face of his preening self-regard: ‘They didn’t know how lucky they were ... all the hairdressers he’d flirted with, all the travel agents, florists and girls in bars. When he was a famous, rich, literary-establishment figure living in Antibes or somewhere they would all realise ...”

“... which the new humanities men are so keen to discover unconscious traces in their predecessors. A self-made man of letters, Pritchett had none of the subsidies and privileges that post-war intellectuals came to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and Spanish masters for himself, and as a novelist and story ...”

“... majority; and it can even be suspected to the contrary that cosmic unity is an invention of the self-repudiating Western mind, imposed upon the Native cultures by Western dissent for purposes ultimately Western. The present book avoids such manichean pitfalls, but confronts their methodological preconditions. Anne Salmond, a Pakeha anthropologist at the ...”

“... fall asleep’. Much of Fima’s behaviour – his deliberate failure at things and his virtuoso self-awareness – makes strategic sense. He chooses to aim low so as to pre-empt the possibility of genuine failure, preferring the fantasy of achievement to putting himself on the line. He perfects the role of clown for fear of being judged seriously, and his ...”