“... they wouldn’t notice if they burned themselves on a hot stove. Towering in their intellect and self-esteem, blunt bangs on a perfect brain, long legs in tarty skirts, don’t care, don’t care. Marvellous, funny, in a way that Byatt purported to be afraid to be. Delivered straight out of the voice, disarming. ‘Literary people are death, I should ...”

“... on their direction. Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a ...”

“... very approach tenses the muscles and always arouses suspicion, are here personally reduced to the self-effacing Mr Brown then replaced by the faceless banana company, which brings with it capitalism, modernity, union-busting, bloody repression and an inevitable relocation (an uncanny anticipation of the US’s own plague of factory expatriation decades ...”

“... I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights ...”

“... and not unfamiliar atmosphere of xenophobic dread in the American heartland, into a tale of heroic self-defence by a valiant policeman, saving himself – and by extension the heartland – from a terrifying anarchist. (I’m writing this in London, in the week the Jean Charles de Menezes inquiry opens; one should stop shaking one’s head at those heartland ...”

“... wealth, eradicate unemployment, pay due respect to war veterans, and, in general, revive the self-sacrificing spirit of the Islamic Revolution. For Khatami, the history of Iran had been ‘the struggle for democracy’. For Ahmadinejad, it was the struggle to establish ‘true’ Islam. On the eve of the ballot, Bush helped Ahmadinejad by dismissing ...”

“... grouches against actual socialism in the Notebooks only underscore how abrasive Frost believed the self-knowledge that others provide could be. ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ sounds more gentle when it claims that a poem, like love, ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom’. But in the Notebooks this wisdom is not the poet’s own: ‘All art begins at the ...”

“... massive deceleration. Unlike Brodkey, Mars-Jones is witty. So the novel displays an amusing self-consciousness about the sluggishness of its project; time and again, Mars-Jones seems to be nudging us to laugh at Pilcrow. Look at the delighted way John describes his grandmother making scrambled eggs: ‘Nothing seemed to happen, and it kept on not ...”

“... to the old educated class and the rapidly growing body of the aspiring and politically conscious self-educated. Even among these, Overy’s footnotes show, circulations of more than 50,000 – the order of magnitude of the Left Book Club and above the contemporary level of a bestseller – were unusual, except in the tense prewar months of 1938-39. Overy’s ...”

“... take their place as allies, until they too became enemies. All this timely betrayal, bribery and self-interest sustained the Byzantine Empire. ‘Gratitude,’ Luttwak writes, ‘is not a virtue in strategy.’ We know that Byzantine soldiers collected information about enemy tactics and weapons, and envoys gave full accounts of the people they ...”

“... of her underwear; she followed some light instinctive purpose, immune to the cautious gravity of self-questioning … Apart from parents and doctors, Mary had never stood naked before anyone in her life. She had been so used to think of herself in the diminutive, her own body reflected back through the loving eyes of those who still viewed her as a ...”

“... with the salesmen behind the mortgage boom. His conclusion: ‘In that restaurant, crammed with self-satisfied know-nothings, we had gazed upon the amoral soul of the housing boom, the crux, the fulcrum, the place where so many dreams would begin, and where surely heartbreak and financial collapse must follow.’ The salesmen were stuffing mortgages down ...”

“... griffin-robbing Arimaspians included, that Caesar in particular had an evident agenda of imperial self-justification, and that some of the things reported of druids are not very different from the behaviour of Roman haruspices. As for the Celtic evidence, none of it, he believes, can plausibly be explained as genuinely surviving from the Roman or pre-Roman ...”

“... have also launched Marcus Aurelius into wider modern fame, as the bestselling father of self-help guides, popular psychology and ‘spiritual teaching’. The secret of this success is not simply the folk wisdom that generous translation can construct out of Marcus’ thorny Greek, which he chose over his native Latin for writing these philosophical ...”

“... quality to her speech which drew people near’) and then, in the distinctive tones of the self-help book, reveals Josetta and Roxy to be ‘my own inventions based on a cross-section of cases’, it is hard to resist the suspicion that she no longer entirely believes in the reality of what she is writing about. She no longer seems even to register ...”