“... Victorian engineers could pull off when motivated. It had given the nation a temporary flush of self-confidence. It had inspired Tennyson to pay suitable tribute in an ode which thereafter appeared in all collected editions of his poems, reminding winners of school prizes down the generations of the wonders that had been, and perhaps today inspiring Andrew ...”

“... its rabid nativism chimed in perfectly, it seems, with America’s post-World War One retreat into self-nurturing – and, with Prohibition on the statute books, its purgative ambitions seemed likely to be smiled on by the Federal Government. During Prohibition, the Klan took to unmasking local bootleggers and if a Klansman were to be caught downing a quick ...”

“... done, in the jargon of the day, so as to ‘avoid scandal’. But then, how minuscule appear the self-evidently scandalous doings of any of this ‘set’, compared to what we have since learned and understood.The book opens and closes in Holloway Prison, where in a princess-and-the-pea setting that by no means denies sympathy to its subject, a society ...”

“... stomach’, and intensify to the point where they start to resemble skinnings and stabbings of the self. Like Marguerite Duras in La Douleur, which she claimed was a wartime journal she found in a drawer, but had no memory of writing, Murakami lays claim to a share in others’ crimes against humanity. His character Okada becomes a kind of clairvoyant ...”

“... Such is the contract signed by most people who come here to live, work and play – to go for it, self-invent, hang on – and, paradoxically perhaps, this contract is also a kind of bond, a form of connection to people who came earlier to attempt these same things.The victims must be honoured, of course, and the families have insisted from the start that a ...”

“... knows all about such effects, and knows – as Pinter does – that they will probably now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be knowingly aware of the effects of place. Swift’s new novel returns to the South-West London of his first two books. It is set in Wimbledon, but ...”

“... replied, despite these same channels’ allegations of censorship under the previous regime. Now self-censorship in the form of soap operas stopped them showing what was slowly emerging as a pro-Chávez multitude. Then one channel suddenly switched to the scene in the street outside its own headquarters. A group of young demonstrators, on motorcycles and ...”

“... or a doctrine’. He complains that my objection to Thatcherism could have been that ‘its self-consciously “ideological” approach to politics was in itself what made it un-Conservative,’ but my ‘critique was targeted at the kind of ideology Thatcherism embodied.’ That is a fair point, but well before Thatcherism had emerged I had expressed ...”

“... doubt the mysteries of her identity are an essential part of the appeal. The various solutions are self-cancelling: in a sense she has less identity now than she did a hundred years ago, when everyone cheerfully accepted the Vasari version. The face in the portrait is ‘indeterminate’, Sassoon observes, and so becomes a ‘terrain for infinite ...”

“... 1950, the notion that cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff were not in principle self-governing, or that local authorities existed to administer nationally determined policy, would hardly have surfaced. And yet by the 1920s, where costly services such as public education were concerned, the balance between money raised on the rates and grants ...”

“... in The Devil’s Larder – there are, after all, 64 squares on a chessboard. Such compositional self-consciousness would certainly suit Crace’s constitution of mind. The various parts in his books always add up correctly. Which is no surprise, since each of his novels asks essentially the same question: given a particular set of circumstances, what ...”

“... focus; it’s forever getting mixed up with whether animals’ thinking is ‘conscious’, or ‘self-conscious’, or whether it’s ‘symbolic’, or ‘semantic’, or whether it’s ‘like ours’. Such conflations are practically irresistible, and Budiansky commits them regularly. Budiansky is inclined to think that being conscious has something to do ...”

“... in which Carson apologises (entirely unnecessarily) for the fact that ‘there is too much self in my writing,’ assuring us: ‘I do not want to be a windowless monad … I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgments – but I go blind ...”

“... he has written a thoroughly entertaining, absorbing account of their mostly misguided and often self-important activities. Whether or not Waldorf Astor’s father, William Waldorf, the first Lord Astor, approved of his son’s marriage to Nancy Shaw – he did not go to the wedding on the grounds of ‘poor health’ – he was not niggardly with his ...”

“... characteristic of scientific revolutions. These twin associations illustrate Brandom’s schizoid self-image as the revolutionary – ‘opposed to many (if not most) of the large theoretical, explanatory and strategic commitments that have shaped and motivated Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th century’ – but also as the spokesman and latest member of ...”