“... or appearance but something more elusive. Yet a tension remains between her sense of the fluid self and her reluctance to abandon the traditional concept of character, for while human complexity must be acknowledged, we also need to identify difference, and character remains a convenient shorthand for doing so. While Beard’s suspicion of conventional ...”

“... her death, was filled with bits of good china and old furniture, quite innocent of Formica. Being self-taught had made her cooking more original – she found out about food from first principles by following her own tastes – but it also gave the whole notion of cooking some piquancy. She came to it as freshly as William Morris did to weaving, and with some ...”

“... including María, drink in. They dwell on miracles and visions, their imaginations quickened by self-mortification and sleeplessness. María devotes herself to the vida of Sor María de Agreda, a (real) 17th-century nun who specialised in ‘mystical bilocation’. Without leaving her convent in Spain she would convert heathens in New Mexico. Indians told ...”

“... a little shy of her strange white visitors, her innate dignity, gentle courtesy and complete self-possession indicate long association with "quality folks".’ When she finally gets to speak for herself, Betty expresses a degree of contentment with – even nostalgia for – her life as a slave. ‘Yesm, we was happy. We got plenty to eat. Marster and ...”

“... only by their lust for Shakespeareana and their unflaggingly competitive spirit. Enthusiastic, self-taught amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship. They mostly earned their livings in other clerkly trades, as journalists, parliamentary reporters or lawyers. In their ...”

“... lack of US control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. ‘The situation in Baquba,’ they claimed, ‘is reassuring and under control’; nasty rumours, they said, were being ‘circulated by bad ...”

“... for. Jones is unafraid of simplicity, so his authorial knowingness comes across less as postmodern self-consciousness than as a proper metaphysical parenting of his characters. The stories are at once intensely controlled and loosely digressive, at once focused and a little awkward: Jones’s favourite mode is to centre his narrative on one character and then ...”

“... to leave written records of their lives, owe much to a Protestant tradition of agonised self-scrutiny, by no means reliably orthodox or complacent. They read the Bible with ‘piety but also with hunger, to discover God’s order, the architecture of His mind. They found a lot to puzzle about.’ Boston’s problem, as Munro sympathetically ...”

“... Olympia 52, Dimanche à Pékin, Les Statues meurent aussi and Lettre de Sibérie – were self-reflexive and had political undertones. It was Bazin who credited Marker with the invention of the essay-film, in which, he suggested, meanings and associations are produced not so much in the way that shots are stitched together as through the relationship ...”

“... millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of unconsciousness much more quickly than the usual upright, and ...”

“... persistent troubles that Laplace encountered as a result of his somewhat lackadaisical, sometimes self-serving failure to cite the work of contemporaries and immediate predecessors adequately. Hahn has seemingly followed the advice once offered to Hawking: mathematical equations lower book sales. This restriction is severe. Previous books, notably ...”

“... with debtor nations, Mellon ‘did little and stayed quiet, still governed by his faith in the self-regulation of markets’. In 1930 and 1931, as the situation worsened, he continued to counsel inaction and spent more and more of his time on his art collection. ‘Buying pictures covertly from the Soviets captured his imagination in a way that presiding ...”

“... would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known’ – he wrote in the margin: ‘This is me.’ So in the course of his life he turned down everything from ...”

“... road from Kabul through Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Admittedly, a strong sense of self-preservation led me to end my journey on the circular road at Ghazni, since between there and Kandahar the danger of attack is very much greater. As far as Ghazni, however, not only did the road seem to be safe enough, but as far as I could see the various ...”

“... from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from Hamlet in that it is true. He went on: ‘I am a historian, not a writer of fiction, and have written the book in the conviction that the duty of a historian is to tell true ...”