“... like a children’s book, Mister Pip is not one, and it is wiser, at least at intervals, than the self-help book it sometimes resembles. Odd though it sounds, it is impossible not to wonder whether in writing this sometimes wonderful, sometimes tedious, unfinished-seeming novel about reading to an audience Jones ever paused to wonder about his own ...”

“... then in girls. Growing up in Honolulu, he was insulated from racial prejudice and even from racial self-consciousness. But there are not very many black people on the island and towards the end of his time there Obama began to be aware of his blackness, not least when he started going to parties and dating. One of the best scenes in the book occurs near the ...”

“... with Elizabeth, who from early in her reign used the progress as one of her chief methods of self-publicity, and went further afield to show herself to her subjects than her father had normally done. Monarchs who went on regular progress were usually successful. It is Elizabeth that we remember as the Virgin Queen, but this was not an unusual image ...”

“... Western nihilism, 9/11 is cast as the latest in the West’s seemingly interminable catalogue of self-inflicted blows against its own dominant myth of progress. The transposition is revealing, for it suggests that Gray writes from the assumption that, if there were progress, it would have taken the form of the universal adoption of either Communism or ...”

“... and it doesn’t help that Karzai is widely seen as indecisive and at the mercy of a cabal of self-interested advisers. Meanwhile, the failure of the government, and of its international allies, to ensure basic security is the single most important cause of public disaffection in Afghanistan. The focus of international attention is the rising number of ...”

“... to the short duration of her chosen turning points. Aware that even decisive moments can hardly be self-contained, she often reaches back to investigate earlier precedents or to look into biographical factors. Even so, however, there are risks of oversimplification attached to this way of framing history. Like Zara Steiner, in her more recent study of the ...”

“... novel for adults, Springtime and Harvest, a dainty romance, was rejected several times before he self-published it in 1901, a year after his marriage to Meta Fuller, a childhood friend. It sold a total of two hundred copies. His next few books didn’t fare much better, and Sinclair was forced to move with his wife and infant son to a three-room cabin ...”

“... his wife divorced. This highly publicised tragic episode marked an end to the tradition of heroic self-experiment that had begun with Kleitman’s descent into the Mammoth Cave, and hastened the shift to laboratory-based neuroscience. In 1963 Dement moved to California and set up the Stanford Sleep Research Centre, which would become the model for the modern ...”

“... France)’, we have to assume that the parenthetical additions are marks of his impulse to private self-aggrandisement. One long paragraph unspools his imaginary employments: ‘captain in the Royal Netherlands Army, plant manager, attaché to the embassy in Peking, banker, clown (famous), painter (famous), archivist-palaeographer, midshipman (aboard the last ...”

“... Portugal, where his religion had been outlawed and even converted Jews were under suspicion. As a self-proclaimed political emissary, he posed a risk to anyone who welcomed him. Every time he travelled, there was a chance that his letters of safe passage would not be recognised. A pure grifter could have found less dangerous ways of making a living. But it ...”

“... no doubt burnished in Reminiscences.It is a tremendous read and a masterclass in carefully crafted self-deprecation as one of the most effective ways of boasting. Harrison comes across as an outsider who always offered a refreshing challenge to the insiders (the ‘Gladstone treatment’ is rolled out more than once); as someone who didn’t take herself ...”

“... of gall.’ He also observed, rather unkindly, that Cecil had been ‘a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament’. Even the king who owed him so much wasn’t convinced that Cecil held the key to the political process. Administrative skill wasn’t everything in early modern politics. Among those who ...”

“... eat and drink: all were determined by your fluid temperament. Dietetic knowledge was a matter of self-diagnosis, informed by your own appetites and routines. The governing rationale was analogy, a kind of thinking that made everyone both physician and poet. A popular manual declared that ‘Every sort of Food hath its operation in the Body, and on the ...”

“... Algeria diminished rather than enhanced French power, he became instead a resolute advocate of self-determination – putting down a coup attempt by the army and surviving assassination attempts by supporters of French Algeria – and accepted independence in 1962. He went on to try to reinvent French greatness yet again, by conducting an autonomous global ...”

“... coiffed, ultimate older sister’, possessed of enviable calm and seemingly preternatural self-assurance. Being with her was oddly soothing: ‘In her world, nothing was a big deal, and everything was just as it should be.’ She attended Melania’s wedding in Palm Beach: 350 guests attended, including the Clintons and P. Diddy; reportedly, the only ...”