“... who they are and how they are to live? Nussbaum is in effect saying to such feminists that the self-silencing brought on by their relativistic worries is no more justified than the silence imposed on feminist voices by societal misogyny or pig-headed colleagues. Having found our voices, we should not muffle or mute them in the name of an ...”

“... time, recognise a value of truth which is not just that – for instance, when we recognise that self-deceit is in itself not the best of states. Again, our ideas of truthfulness are under a great deal of strain at present. On the one hand, we tend to be pervasively suspicious, anxious not to be fooled, eager to see through appearances to the real motives ...”

“... both he and his nation were pliant to circumstance. Diaries tend to be written either by comically self-important Mr Toads or by Pooters – those who need to record their daily successes and triumphs over their rivals in order to be sure that they have actually got to where they hope they have got to. Pepys has traces of both Toad and Pooter, but he also ...”

“... the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon ...”

“... giving a shit”: what you would … or … wouldn’t do in order to maintain dignity and self-respect in the face of another individual or an institution’. It was about the mystery of those middle-class people who didn’t appear to care about keeping a clean house, while for working-class people ‘maintenance of ...”

“... careful, but be careful not to seem too careful: Dec. 14: Lunch with IH. Shifty fucker, absurdly self-conscious. Ate next to nothing and pretended not to drink. Even so polished off two thirds of bottle. Indifferent muck, thank Christ – not that he’d know. Wants something from me, I’m convinced, but what? Fidgeted throughout. Monosyllabic when quizzed ...”

“... looted vehicles, killed and humiliated people. They wanted to kill us. That was when we formed the self-defence forces.’ He had limited fighting experience. He had worked for the UN and African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur before it was wound up during the transition and had then turned to smuggling cars from Libya to Darfur. Since the desert was ...”

“... on Station Road they sell well at the expense of the low. 4. Stone Flung Near Head of Observer The self-propelled mower guided along firebreak regrowth, fresh growth, growth sticking its head up too high, to be lopped off, tall-poppied, struck a blow for neatness and order, and so out of Shire rules to prevent spread, prevent the roll of fires, appease nervous ...”

“... worst so mimetically maimed us as to make our – or anyway my – utter loathing for it a form of self-loathing . . . Fast-forward twenty-five years to my second exhibit: a campus in New England – old England on steroids; the hills pumped up into mountains, the little creosote potting sheds swollen to ark-sized dairy barns anchored on meadows big as ...”

“... phrase was latched onto by Flann O’Brien, in his satiric denunciations of Irish falsity or self-dramatisation wherever it cropped up, whether with Gaelic Leaguers or island autobiographers. Between Synge of the exorbitant syntax and Flann O’Brien’s adept mimicry of Gaelic inflation (‘Ambrose was an odd pig and I do not think that his like will be ...”

“... movie star. In the first part of the novel, Orton establishes a comic voice for Susan as the self-styled ingénue in a world of cheap bedsits, desperate gay alcoholics and sexual decadence. Some of the details of Susan’s daily life are borrowed from Dorothy Parker’s Diary of a New York Lady, written in the Forties and subtitled ‘During Days of ...”

“... shall recuperate the Malvinas, les Malouines, into renewed restiveness and the wasps of doubt, of self-doubt, of resolution, of intelligences swarm? ‘a culture of regressive repetitions ... ’ Brave men and a gallant ship, her namesake also sank in World War Two by bomber aircraft. Carried aboard were large mediaeval nails from the bombed cathedral, formed ...”

“... suspicious of books produced by the tape-recorder, for they offer endless scope for deception and self-deception. It is perfectly possible for such a book to be saying nothing whatever for long stretches, and no one, not even the compiler, will have noticed. Or it can be saying something important which, again, the compiler never intended and is not aware ...”

“... He is convinced that their descent into the meaningless reflects that of England, ‘confused, self-hating England’, where the plague of depression is ‘spreading like a virulent, dimly understood virus’. Consequently, he attends closely to the condition of the country in his mother’s youth and his own. He nominates 1956, the year of his own ...”

“... but do not form a coherent picture. Paolo, as we have seen, gives his factory away; Pietro is the self-hating painter we have looked at; Odetta becomes catatonic and is carted away to hospital; Lucia starts picking up and sleeping with young men who look a little like the visitor; and, most interestingly, Emilia returns to her native village and speaks to no ...”