“... Williams, the novelist Amelia Opie and the novelist and dramatist Elizabeth Inchbald. Hays was self-conscious about her looks, never allowed her portrait to be taken, and was punished for the crime of being plain in the macho chit-chat of men she had imagined were her friends. The last section of the book will be the most familiar to those who still read ...”

“... the name is a sort of protest – cutting down on his expenses and his human contacts, drifting in self-imposed quarantine. It’s a suggestive image for a man who hadn’t been able to make a go of things abroad, couldn’t then stand to be on his home island, and could only regroup in the changeable element. He sold the boat at a decent profit, went to ...”

“... agendas of strategic internationalism. Such a position, as Clark noted, laid Dorn wide open to the self-inflating hysteria and reflex moral outrage that were the defining characteristics of Pacific Rim academia. ‘In Boulder, if you tell an obscene politically incorrect joke, someone may laugh,’ Clark said. ‘And if you say something incredibly insulting ...”

“... that they are willing to wolf them down by the millions. (It’s a subject in its own right, the self-reinforcing phenomenon of the contemporary mega-seller; by which I mean not just the garden variety bestseller but the book or books which go to that mysterious other place in the popular consciousness, when it’s as if reading them has somehow been made ...”

“... mythology, Old English literature, religion (Tolkien was a devout Catholic, Lewis at this point a self-described agnostic), fantasy and beer. Tolkien played some part in Lewis’s rediscovery of his Christian faith at the beginning of the 1930s, though he was disappointed that his friend stopped at the halfway house of Anglicanism (in so far as Lewis adopted ...”

“... shortcomings in practice; the dangers of superstition and its grip on his life. He was not above self-loathing, though Niehaus never says as much. Crucially, for anthropologist and monograph, Jimmy could switch in a trice between foul and fair: eye of newt and tongue of frog one moment, the resounding victory of his pupils in end-of-year exams the ...”

“... something even less expected: a development pattern that, beginning around 1200 BCE, was entirely self-generated. Instead of being implanted from outside, the Israelite hilltop culture had grown up entirely on its own. Such findings should have been a godsend for Sand since they showed that the Israelites, far from conquering the whole of Canaan, had taken ...”

“... children. It works. But the location of the point of view is not clear. Is it Abbott’s own self-awareness we are reading? Is it the view of Connell, whom he is with? Is it a detached, authoritative, implied narrator? The mobility and occasional ambiguity of perspective becomes more complex in Salter’s later works. In A Sport and a Pastime we have a ...”

“... fact ‘directed against our country’; Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, parroted this self-serving line in August 2007, announcing that the assassination had been organised from abroad by forces seeking to destabilise Russia (code for Boris Berezovsky). Another Byzantine theory holds that rogue elements in the FSB carried out the killing, as part ...”

“... early days of MI5 because of the latter’s relative autonomy – Andrew calls it ‘essentially self-tasking’ – which allowed its officers to follow their whims, which must have been coloured, if not determined, by their social backgrounds, and were emphatically not typical of most of the compatriots they were supposed to be serving, especially when the ...”

“... thing but probably lies deep in my character.It is a strange performance, the clash of callow self-certainty with a certain innate modesty, resolved in a (typically Zweigian) stance of passivity and helplessness and evasion (‘probably’). Compare this to the insight into his processes provided in The World of Yesterday, his last work:So if my books are ...”

“... the campaign; indeed shut its eyes and closed its ears, according to Andy Burnham. This is a self-serving argument, and untrue. No British election has ever been won or lost on immigration or crime. And Labour didn’t ignore them. On the contrary, Labour’s policies on both have been driven by and for public effect. From the moment it came to office in ...”

“... is probably a more reliably involving gambit than Here’s what happened. Some of Marías’s self-consciousness as a writer can probably be set down to his patrimony. The son of a well-known philosopher father (who also wrote a book on Cervantes), he made an early start as a novelist in what he understood to be an old tradition: in 1971, at the age of ...”

“... Eufor handed over to a UN force. Like Kouchner, the EU spoke of ‘success’, and this note of self-congratulation was echoed by Darfur activists, who had been urging an intervention in Chad. The columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent member of Save Darfur and one of the first to talk of genocide in 2004, wrote recently in the New York Review of ...”

“... couldn’t be that God made sickness,’ she argued. ‘It turned people into useless self-centred people who became a burden to themselves and to everyone else.’ The religion’s antipathy to medicine added a further strand to the Astors’ troublesome relations with their children. When their oldest daughter, Wissie, had a serious riding ...”