“... feed or cling or even manage its own temperature control. Most of its repertoire, instead, is self-advertisement. That is where, according to Hrdy, infant fat comes in. The baby is saying, not just ‘love me’ but ‘keep me.’ Unlike any other primate, it is born with a dimpled roundness which proclaims: ‘I am a healthy baby, a big, bonny baby ...”

“... us that in his early years Fuller wrote a ‘very attractive’ book on Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666. Visiting politicians include the Liberal Lord Beauchamp, whom Fothergill to his dismay overcharges for a consignment of hock. It was Beauchamp who in 1931 suddenly resigned all his offices and went to live abroad, having been threatened ...”

“... Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he cleans up the kitchen and bathroom and is just tackling the fireplace in his mother’s room when the doorbell ...”

“... meaning in boxing. If their chosen hero prevails, they can nail their colours to his mast; if he self-destructs, an instrument is created with which to chart the demise of the American dream. The boxing world’s association with organised crime, drugs and race inspires dark feelings and is an element of the harsh romance that white writers pursue with black ...”

“... found in it clear evidence that the rural Irish were still unfit for the responsibilities of self-government, a possibility then under active consideration. Bridget Cleary’s husband, her father, aunt and four cousins were all charged in connection with her death. Cleary pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a 20-year sentence; the various members ...”

“... through a gap in the curtains.’ There is too much on show in Three Dollars, too many details self-consciously disclosed. And in The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, important scenes are frequently written in awkward, clotted prose. ‘We were at each other’s throats,’ says a young Jewish woman in one of the stories, an assistant working in a Moscow ...”

“... culture intersect and his study shows the possibility of escape from the enclosed and self-conscious boundaries of strict ethnicity – it might even make Reginald Byron cheer up a bit. Wall is more concerned with what a writer chooses as subject-matter than with where he or she is from. He discusses the work of writers from a great variety of ...”

“... or in the ignominy of their difference’. The telling assimilation of class to species, or of a self-made man to a counterfeit coin, opens a window onto the unabashedly hierarchical worldview of feudal society at prayer. No less important than class was the great divide between clergy and laity, with monks and nuns (the ‘spiritual people’) enjoying the ...”

“... family tree which traced his descent back to Odin. But what he now regarded as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, his contribution to the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, everyone else saw as the just punishment of a ...”

“... cultural stereotype’: that of the pious female martyr, the embodiment of feminine self-sacrifice. The most powerful example in Britain was Edith Cavell, whose execution by the German authorities in 1915 for running a refugee smuggling network out of her nurses’ training school was useful propaganda for the Allies. British newspapers, which ...”

“... an account of Herbert Hart’s life that reflects her desire to see the mask of respectability and self-possession torn off, so that people will know what she had to cope with. Hart seems to have used the diaries partly as a substitute for intimacy, but perhaps he left them for Jenifer on purpose. These days, unfortunately, a biographer presented with such ...”

“... for Japan simultaneously because the Japanese language doesn’t set up a strict boundary between Self and Other – a claim that doesn’t impress the hard-nosed Tsutsui.) Tsutsui gives this kind of stuff ample space, but – being both a fan and an academic writing for a mass audience – he’s terrified of sounding too serious. In a doomed effort to make ...”

“... by social justice. The virtuous circle is one in which long-term economic and political gains are self-sustaining, because confidence on both fronts becomes mutually reinforcing. The problem all along was how to get there from here, when here meant that Labour was so distrusted that it would never be allowed the economic latitude to fulfil its political ...”

“... strictly necessary to leading a modest existence. His first wife, Lucretia, was such a miracle of self-abnegation and anxious piety that had she not died from consumption she would surely have perished from excessive virtue. William was saved from this life of hair-shirtedness by Emily, his more worldly and practical second wife (and Eleanor’s ...”

“... through the glass ceiling ‘by sheer character and initiative’, that rarity for her age, a self-made woman. She was a mature 26 when she agreed to marry Henry, over 30 when the marriage was consummated, well beyond the normal age of first wedlock for aristocratic women. Her mind, her religion, her tastes, are all subjects with some depth to them, and ...”