“... is the puritan insistence that what matters is what’s ‘inside’. To avoid being typecast, the self is dematerialised. The external trappings of human beings are discarded as so much dross. In Kantian style, freedom and value lie within, not in the degraded world of phenomena. It is hard to know how to avoid the more odious forms of stereotyping without ...”

“... was made for the public use of the people.’ The Bible was bursting at both ends: radicals and self-appointed prophets were adding to scripture; scholars were eroding it. These unco-ordinated interventions had immediate literary repercussions, and Milton’s Paradise Lost is the crucial text in any discussion of the relation between divine and human powers ...”

“... and it is difficult at first to grasp the full horror of events. Isis, with a new baby and a self-absorbed schoolteacher husband in the throes of Freudian analysis, developed a passionate crush on her GP. The doctor seemed, perhaps, to return her feelings. He once held her hand slightly longer than was necessary and he was kind about her baby, who was ...”

“... that the nine-year-old ‘refused to conform to the customs or routine of school life and exuded a self-confidence which could only have been interpreted as a form of provocation’. The headmaster warned Leo, then colonial secretary, that Julian was ‘far too inclined to criticise and, I fancy, has a very good opinion of himself’. He was ...”

“... by a need, on the one hand, and an ambition, on the other. The need is to prevent the rhythmic, self-destructive fluttering that can be generated when the cadence of a live load (marching men, wind-driven eddies) matches one of the bridge’s modes of vibration. The ambition is to cross wider spans with lighter, more economical structures. The two aims are ...”

“... George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of what exists to the possibilities of economic and social change. Novels quite often time travel under the heading of movement from ...”

“... is riveting. A series of failed suicide attempts (classified by the military as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’) and mass hunger strikes have taken place in Guantánamo. The first hunger strike began in February 2002, just over a month after the first prisoners arrived there, shackled hand and foot, hooded and blindfolded by blacked-out ...”

“... selection during an ancient smallpox epidemic; but it’s enough to puncture the vain notion, as self-regarding as the belief that mankind is indestructible, that a disease by itself could end our reign on earth. Mankind’s relationship with viruses in the past few hundred years has followed parallel tracks: exterminate and propagate. Caroline, Princess of ...”

“... which followed, and of its utter failure to develop the territory politically in preparation for self-government. Only now are there signs of a Belgian Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a movement towards a more candid confrontation with the past. The curious ExitCongoMuseum exhibition, at Leopold’s old Africa museum at Tervuren, has been retracing the ...”

“... the temper of the times, and very much in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, who was also self-consciously out of step with the times, and who remains for the most part unassimilated by contemporary philosophy, in spite of being conventionally venerated as one of the few great philosophers of the 20th century. Stroud’s philosophical ...”

“... its virtues, passions and pathos, Hillenbrand’s modern horse book feels trammelled by its own self-consciousness, as if it were forced to tell a meta-legend rather than a legend. Its attention to the cultural baggage – to Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt – may well be called for by hindsight, but I suspect that what made Seabiscuit such a legend in his ...”

“... most of them undertaken in the course of one of her 11 pregnancies. The intellectually vigorous, self-improving culture of the Methodists made the children what they were. George had a library of a thousand books, which Hannah had to pack and unpack. These were the ordinary conditions of such a life. Indeed there were complaints from the congregation that ...”

“... effects. This ambivalence, visible in his alternation between simple lyrics and laments of drunken self-absorption, is missing from Mariengof’s work, leaving only a succession of mangled metaphors, whose emptiness can be misread as straightforward unpleasantness. This is not to suggest that Mariengof was simply trying to épater le bourgeois. The devastation ...”

“... her treatment of relationships. In the contemporary novel, sex is not often a cheerful, mutely self-sufficient act but rather a prelude to lots of difficult emotion, complicated misunderstandings and dark and brooding thoughts. In Gordimer’s novels, when sex arrives, and more particularly when men arrive, everything suddenly becomes simple (there may be ...”

“... and Africa, the two poles represented by his father and his mother. This was a typically inflated self-image. The reality is that like many Afrikaner families in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, the Van der Post household was torn between loyalty to the Volk and a powerful attraction to metropolitan British culture. Born in 1906, the 11th of 13 ...”