“... and study than Hugo’s numbing spontaneity. Hugo has come down to us as the dubious paragon of self-assertion, at home, where he had it easy, but just as much in politics or in literature, as a writer whose pen too readily outran his great intelligence. Too much, however, can be made of this arrogance, as if the satirical purchase that it provides were the ...”

“... naked mole rats. Many sociologists see it differently, however. Backbenchers, they might say, are self-conscious in a way that mole rats are not; they are capable of explaining their own actions. But so what? asks Runciman. ‘The! Kung of the Kalahari are as aware as the professors and graduate students who study them of the function of meat-sharing in ...”

“... sale of his papers. Singer’s American career developed slowly, and involved a whole series of self-inventions and pseudonyms. In 1925, in Warsaw, he had renamed himself ‘Yitskok Bashevis’, taking his mother’s name and thereby distancing himself from his father and brother. In New York, working as a journalist, he signed his articles and essays ...”

“... leadership to the protest movement of the mid-Eighties. Now, the PC is a shadow of its former self; the PS has moved to the centre-left, ruling with its pre-1973 adversaries, the Christian Democrats; and the MIR is long dead. The Christian Democrats, having backed the coup for about a year, waited until the economic collapse of the early Eighties allowed ...”

“... here from the massacrous world of Blood Meridian, since the boy worries even about this act of self-defence: ‘I dont know. I dont know nothin about him. I never even knew his name. He could have been a pretty good old boy. I dont know. I dont know that he’s supposed to be dead.’ These reflections concern a paid assassin. John Grady’s ...”

“... activity, it is not easy to unravel the mutually-reinforcing motives of selflessness and self-interest, and Prochaska does not try to do so. All that can safely be said is that most members of the royal family have difficulty distinguishing between concern about society, concern about the social order and concern about what best to do so they can ...”

“... could he turned into a sacred space, a secular shrine. We catch a whiff here of the high-minded self-indulgence of today’s avant-garde ‘installations’. Most of the radical ideas about framing in the last decades of the 19th century which are documented in this book were conceived by artists, and chiefly, often exclusively, with reference to the needs ...”

“... Surrealism, characteristically blended with pseudo-archaic proverbial sagacity, fails to disguise self-pity. In life, he said, one throws a ball and hopes that one’s friends will form a wall that enables it to return: but it usually falls, as if it had hit a wet sheet. Huffington, concerned to help us to understand the deterioration of Picasso’s relations ...”

“... however unresponsive and unappetising – are what George Eliot called equivalent centres of self: as real to themselves as we are to ourselves. Lucy Ellmann has written a slim but stylish first novel. The matter of Sweet Desserts is easily summarised, though summary destroys the odd angling of the narrative. This is a daughter’s novel, but told ...”

“... than simple emergency food relief, the EPLF can also claim to be working towards the goal of self-reliance. Yet all of these advances are cordoned off from the rest of Africa by the remoteness of the terrain and the exigencies of the war. It is a strange situation: in a secluded corner of the continent a ragged army of Eritrean fighters is defending some ...”

“... one central reason. It exposes both its main subject and her royal catch, not as the dim-witted, self-obsessed lovers who have been pickled for posterity, but as nasty, determined Fascists who wanted to preside over a ‘new social order’ which would do away for ever with all pretence at democracy and consign all opposition to the ...”

“... its manipulation, by the government of the United States. This is mannered and highly self-conscious prose, ungainly and even downright ugly. Does it clarify an idea or a principle or a fact? It certainly requires some effort to disentangle, and it certainly mirrors the stalemate between Cubans and Americans. But after reading it one is only able ...”

“... illusions, those properties of coherence and inherence that make a good piece of writing a self-sustaining world of words. If you attempt something of this kind, you assume the burden of telling your audience, with appropriate method and emphasis, what they will discover that they already know; and there can be no greater challenge to those skills of ...”

“... Douglas was sure to bring him further disasters. It was the clearest possible proof of Wilde’s self-destructiveness that knowing all he did about the treachery of this lover he should again put himself in his hands. If one emotion prevails over all others in Ellmann’s book it is loathing and contempt for Bosie, Wilde’s great love and worst enemy – a ...”

“... in high politics. Lloyd George had learned the trade in a hard school. Though incapable of self-criticism, he was shrewd at judging, and ruthless in exploiting, the reactions of others. He was a first-class negotiator. His political perceptions were extremely quick: he was never tied by inertia to his previous position. He kept his ear close to the ...”