“... Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was a politician, and brought a writer’s vices with him: a titanic but fragile ego, limitless self-interest and thirst for adulation, an unsleeping vigilance for any slight. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s first book, published in 2016, described his childhood poverty and rise out of it, and made him the liberal media’s favourite hick-whisperer. Communion ...”

“... he wanted to hear – only increased the agitation; Arthur recalled ‘constant vigilance and self-repression, for fear Papa should be vexed. I never said what I thought, but what I thought he would like me to say.’ Fred regretted that ‘with him we were … decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices … We ...”

“... and historical: geographical distance and colonial institutions engendered a distinct culture and self-consciousness, and, with it, a collective identity that laid the foundation for independent states. The late 19th century saw a repetition of this process in the white dominions of Canada and Australasia. Seen in this light, contemporary Taiwanese ...”

“... novel. Rorty speaks of ‘unconscious selves’, which Freud never does, not needing the idea of a self or selves. Rorty does not speak of unrelenting and often violent conflict, and he refers to these putative unconscious selves as ‘the intellectual peers of our conscious selves’; as though far from being crude, or primitive, or instinctual – all words ...”

“... engaged in the mysterious business of being older. He was serious and clever, short-sighted and self-possessed. He had dark hair, olive skin, spectacles, and as he grew up was developing the large, bony, somewhat root-like nose that he and I (but not my sister) inherited from our mother. He was prodigious. At his ninth birthday party, he calmly told Nigel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would take as a compliment, a sign that he was living up to his sense of his properly disreputable self. At the end of the film, as Belmondo lies dying on the street – the law has caught up with him, Seberg has given him away – he says: ‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse.’ He means disgusting in the sense of shitty, a raw deal, a mess, but what is he ...”

“... internet in general, promise to fill in the gaps between society’s three cardinal points: the self (individual, spectator, voter), the masses (population, audience, electorate) and power (party, spectacle, government). The promise is partly kept. Individuals can and do form flash commonwealths of mutual interest. For me, it was merely reassuring to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”