“... a sharp decline in the number of employers, down by a good third in the period. The ranks of the self-employed were artificially inflated by large numbers of unemployed trying their hand, often briefly, at shopkeeping and of smallholders with no more than a patch of land who were classified as farmers. Yet the really fundamental change was that, more and ...”

“... of the window – is hard against the edge of the canvas. In Nude in the Bath of 1924 a sliver of self-portrait (foot, dressing-gown, hands – perhaps sketching) breaks the upper-left-hand edge. Most perversely, by all ordinary conventions of composition, figures and faces (or parts of them) appear in these borderlands. In The White Tablecloth (1926) a scrap ...”

“... become uniquely different from us’. There is something endearingly American about this credo of self-creation; Wright continues: ‘We struggle through experience to build our character. Our task is to make ourselves unique … We become the people we choose to be; this is the premise of free will.’ This interpretation would probably not be shared by most ...”

“... Where Hegel makes our heads spin with his symphonic portrayals of the shifting configurations of a self-propelling dialectic, and Heidegger dizzies us with his hermeneutic shuttle between different origins of existence, Fernández-Armesto keeps us firmly on familiar ground, regaling us with curious anecdotes, and reassuring us with simple philosophical ...”

“... mind, Sussex’s wonderful Indian, Ranjitsinhji: ‘What W.G. did was to unite in his mighty self all the good points of all the good players, and to make utility the criterion of style. He founded the modern theory of batting by making forward and back play of equal importance, relying neither on one nor the other, but on both ... He turned the ...”

“... clung to the bars and studiously ignored the men behind them. They conversed in low voices, but self-consciously. They knew perfectly well that every man in the cell was looking at them, mentally undressing them, even weighing up their chances, as perhaps the desk sergeant was encouraging them to do. It didn’t matter that they tried to keep still, as ...”

“... This suited the upwardly-mobile class of metropolitan naturalists to whose ambitions of social self-advancement the status quo was a constraint. The model of a forward-and-upward-striving cosmic development merged well with the aspirations of Owen cum suis. Quite so; rise in your profession and you might grow up to be a realised Idea. I am ...”

“... Jacqueline’s central and totemic position in this icon as tragic queen, figurehead, sustainer, self-exposer, survivor, is an allegory of her having played, on the evidence of her appearances in the works, a more comprehensive role in Picasso’s life than any of his other women, not least because she was part of that life for nearly twenty years, was there ...”

“... for which reason, perhaps, they find him fascinating. Good will and the instinct for self-preservation therefore commend to him a role which he likens to that of Scheherazade, a teller of distracting tales. It is a role of which both he and they tire, as prison life gradually becomes the only real life, but his habit of ruminating on the past ...”

“... the view of a single individual. The author of every utopia invariably takes his vision to be self-evidently the only possible one for the fully rational man. He is necessarily committed to the claim that there is a common purpose behind all human communities, a single goal, which most men have failed to reach because they were not clear-sighted enough to ...”

“... the church he suffers agonies because he’s too prim to bathe naked with the other men. He’s self-absorbed and selfless at the same time, accident-prone, masochistic: a kind of holy fool. But just as he grates intolerably on our nerves, nothing but an ‘Odd Bod’, as his fellow students claim, ‘a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk’, we glimpse ...”

“... chair, perch himself on a stool, and shave. This was one of Sunday’s simple-minded pleasures and self-indulgences: to shave at what time one pleased, and as long as one pleased, with the children nearby, watching, convincing one that a morning stubble was an amazing thing, and that the shaving instruments were holy tools, and that the act of sprinkling water ...”

“... explanation is that, in a long vigil, she came to think that an acceptance would amount to a self-interested interference in other people’s lives, the act of just such an ‘imaginist’ as Emma Woodhouse would afterwards become. Given that her putative victims all seem to have approved of the projected marriage, I am more convinced by Lord David ...”

“... the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body’. Jefferson did not exhibit the same self-knowledge and when he complained to Franklin during the course of the debate over the Declaration of Independence about the ‘degradations’ and ‘mutilations’ of his draft, Franklin was reminded of an incident from which, he said, ‘I took my ...”

“... turned into a voodoo carnival. Similar things are not unknown in Ireland, where Terry Eagleton’s self-consciously carnivalesque first novel is set. Saints and Scholars begins with a drably journalistic reconstruction of the execution of James Connolly at Kilmainham gaol in 1916. The opening pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s green overalls ‘stand ...”