“... twenty-five years, in a bloodless decimation that is none the less cruel for that. During his self-addressed discourse Garcia Marquez twice mentioned the word ‘solitude’ and at least once quoted in full his by now famous title. It seemed as if he had not only invented the ‘concept of solitude’ (thus dismissing the autumn of Petrarch), but also the ...”

“... abstractions. Indeed he did not have a real visual world, as he did not have a real visual self. He could speak about things, but did not see them face-to-face. Hughlings Jackson, discussing patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost ‘abstract’ and ‘propositional’ thought – and compares them with dogs ...”

“... Menschenkenner” ’ (i.e. no judge of people). To those who are not au fait with the subtle, self-protecting, teasing ways in which psychoanalysis both tries and refuses to connect with the external world this may seem surprising. ‘Throughout his life’, Malcolm continues, Freud ‘was beset by the affliction of overestimation’, but since the ...”

“... that often cluster round it. He didn’t care much for fame, for instance, or go in for self-advertisement, was careless about his reputation and was unmoved by criticism. So much about him is mature and admirable he seems a bigger baby for what is not. It was Kallman who found Auden dead in 1973, lying in his hotel bed in Vienna after a poetry ...”

“... between China and the West are a constant source of instruction. An a-moral struggle for self-preservation sounded as discordant a note for Confucianism as it had for much of Christendom. If only Wallace had entered China, with his transference of struggle from intra- to inter-specific competition, how even more Chinese would he have ...”

“... a hummocky common of gorse and bracken’. Yet amidst all the tawdriness of this new Britain, the self-satisfaction of the English manages somehow to persist: in the routine insincerities which pass for conversation at the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club, and in television soap operas like An Englishman’s Home – snobbish, unfunny and parochial. George fails in ...”

“... opponents of nuclear energy. The nuclear industry blamed its critics for problems that were mainly self-inflicted, if not indeed inherent in the technology. By 1986 nuclear-power programmes throughout the industrial world had slowed almost to a standstill. The reasons were manifold. Electricity use had fallen short of the growth rates anticipated a decade ...”

“... to tea-meetings than to studying up his sermons. This community – with its good-heartedness and self-importance, its gorgeous evening-gowns and its substantial food – is vigorously presented and subtly investigated. In the ex-minister’s invalid daughter – the manufacturer of all gossip and the subject of none, whose eyes have ‘something of the ...”

“... Bert, a man who was able to take and to give pleasure – a fine portrait, which is also a self-portrait, of a second father. Bert’s testimony, and Ilse’s, are probably paramount. ‘The image you give,’ Fraser tells Ilse, meaning the image she gives of him, as a boy (the ‘you’s’, ‘she’s’ and ‘he’s’ can be taxing), ‘is one of ...”

“... George Eliot’s best woman friend, is the perfect choice. She combined in her idiosyncratic self all the factors needed for a feminist of that time: she was wealthy, independent, middle-class, educated, radical, married – but to a French eccentric who let her go her own way – and childless. Her background was nonconformist in two senses. She was one ...”

“... middle of the night, often on quite trivial matters. The author suggests this reflected a lack of self-confidence in domestic affairs but strongly denies that it was a sign of weakness. Once again, the evidence seems very much against him. Eden was desperately over-sensitive to press hostility and to taunts of appeasement from the Suez Group, and some of his ...”

“... volumes and the modern-spelling collection, despite the absence of apparatus and the continual self-advertisement, can hold their own against most opposition. The raison d’être of the old-spelling collection is doubtful: for defences of its silent alterations and for readings at present lacking any explanatory support we shall have to wait for the ...”

“... of the value of scholarly knowledge to common life is given momentary substance. This largely self-educated bookseller’s son, scarred by scrofula, partially blind and deaf, afflicted by obsessive thoughts as well as a constitutional melancholy which he claimed made him ‘mad all his life, at least not sober’, prone to compulsive movements, rituals ...”

“... War. But these facts were never mentioned in DPRK propaganda. ‘Juche’, an aggressive form of self-reliance, was the word coined to designate this xenophobia. When I asked the interpreter on my first trip whether he had read any Marx or Engels or Lenin, he looked puzzled. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everything is interpreted by Comrade Kim Il-sung.’ He ...”

“... bedside, in Beirut’s Zahla Hospital, for nearly a month and, to his family, he seemed his old self. He continued to pray and to read the Koran, but to the highly secular Jarrahs that didn’t matter. Their son had returned. ‘He was very shaken by his father’s near-death experience,’ Sengün would later tell German investigators. ‘He was so much ...”