“... forming intricate and often fragile patterns of stabilising relationships. She is sure that self-interest, be it in the form favoured by Hobbes or by today’s rational choice theory, won’t do. Naturally there can be some meeting of minds out of pure self-interest, as in a fiercely controlled structure like a ...”

“... The motive must be in part the journalist’s or historian’s drive to tell the story; in part, self-justification. But self-justification alone sets up reasons and excuses that the perspective of history is quite likely to mock. Diaries are usually far more self-revelatory than ...”

“... for it in different ways. Because we cannot help having dissimilar beliefs and desires, it was self-evident that nature and nature’s God meant us to pursue our happiness in our own, unique manner. That was the reason for our inalienable right to search or not to search for our salvation here or hereafter as we saw fit. There was much confidence in the ...”

“... see – with the depth and passion of his earnest glance – the real nature of his gifts, of his self, and of his truest material, has become able to transmute his very misunderstandings into art of a crystalline honesty. The Enigma of Arrival newly constitutes Naipaul’s claim to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since ...”

“... was humanly as dead as mutton. This being the case, Africans were clearly without a capacity for self-development, and it was to remedy this otherwise fatal deficiency that the great colonial mission was really for. So it was said from lectern and pulpit, and so it continued to be said. Despite the democratic upheavals forecast for colonics in the Second ...”

“... Christina the poetess lived as an ascetic, her religious devotion powerless to assuage the self-loathing which seems to have dominated so much of her adult life. (According to more than one account, she died raving at her own perdition.) ‘Why, one wonders,’ as Jan Marsh puts it, ‘did the four siblings have such difficulties when their ...”

“... did not last long: as the body aged, its powers faded, until it became a shadow of its former self, halfway towards the half-life it would enjoy thereafter in the kingdom of the shades. The power of the body, however, was far more than the power to attract. A Greek man or woman would not think they were being superficial if they assessed someone according ...”

“... events both world-historical and interpersonal (perhaps at the same time) etc. This ironic self-examination puts the protagonist somewhere between @laurenoyler (the character’s description of her Twitter avatar matches the author’s profile pic) and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces (although she’d hate to be compared to him). She ...”

“... Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning. Even the best careers are brief, self-destructive and likely to end in humiliation rather than triumph. Every fight pivots on a ‘moment of visceral horror … when one boxer loses control, cannot maintain his defence, begins to waver, falter, fall back, rock with his opponent’s punches ...”

“... feminist criticism has degenerated since its harmonious beginnings in the mid-1970s, becoming a self-enclosed hive of accusations and counter-accusations. I believe her. It sounds awful. Why keep going to those conferences, listening to those papers that attack or ignore you? Why cling to the fantasy of a lost concord? It is hard for the fight against ...”

“... syndrome (‘spectral pall’) that can readily be diagnosed in many other cases. And Healey? Self-evidently a man of catholic literary tastes, formed and sustained by a lifetime of interstitial reading amid busy days and nights, he was formidably equipped to rise to the challenge of authorship. His grand strategy was brilliantly simple: to write his own ...”

“... here. What there is, however, is evidence of a much loved writer’s vexed and only partially self-aware personality. The pioneer woman is meant to be a silent type. In the 1910s Cather was a minimalist from the cornfields, a bright spot in the long shadow of Henry James. Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis ...”

“... Yeshe’s remains to deny him his final religious rites. So far, the state has responded to the self-immolations by equipping police patrols with fire extinguishers and arresting anyone who survives the flames. The authorities have also extended criminal responsibility for the act to families, communities, villages and monasteries. These measures have ...”

“... signs he detected early on. He’s a lover traduced, but is he right that Britain has become a self-harming, venal little nation since it spurned his affections? That’s how it looks, to be sure, and his evidence is depressingly thorough, yet he’s confident we brought this on ourselves and hopeful, for that reason, that we can come to our senses and ...”

“... bad to worse. I was 24, I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; and the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented. The whole business of being Irish in England seemed to me old-fashioned and, in tiny ways, ghastly. People thought I was amusing, in an ...”