“... unless Canetti was thinking – as I doubt whether he was – of the best-selling genre of self-help, personal growth books. I don’t mean to suggest that the Analects is guided by the aim of advising others on how to achieve therapeutic, romantic or financial success; but stylistically there is a strong similarity. That said, these chunks do add up ...”

“... to the music of bands like the Replacements who sang tepidly defiant sagas of generational self-pity: ‘We’re getting no place/As fast as we can.’ Moody situates a gallery of burned-out kids in the toxic environment of northern New Jersey – the landscape the sociologist Donna Gaines has called a ‘teenage wasteland’. The ‘chromium ...”

“... species, humans and ants among them, often act in ways which moral philosophers would describe as self-sacrificing or altruistic, abandoning limb or even life itself seemingly for the benefit of others; or even, in the case of humans, for less tangible causes such as class, faith or nation. The dilemma for what has become known as orthodox Darwinism is how to ...”

“... and sulky about the way things were as an adolescent raging against his pimples. The degree of self-absorption is remarkable. But while it is what made him such a good actor, it also accounts for some central vacuum which requires him to trash his talent, his world and anyone he comes into contact with. If you stare too long at the reflection of your own ...”

“... in these forests and their neighbouring savannahs can still be sheltered from destruction, or even self-destruction, is pretty much an open question. Against this now customary pessimism, optimists, such as the authors of these books, argue that the long process of imperialist dispossession has begun to give way to another, contrary process and that Africa’s ...”

“... and terracotta. Barry Unsworth’s new novel is set in this DIY world inhabited by the suddenly self-made, the restless retired, the seekers of salvation in the soil – someone else’s soil, however, some corner of a foreign field. We’re in Umbria, in the sticks, not far from Perugia and not far from Lake Trasimene, where – hence the title ...”

“... the gulf – the yawning, tragi-comic gulf – between authorial achievement and authorial self-ranking. The ‘little lives and little prefaces’ he was asked to provide for a new, multi-volume edition of ‘the English poets’ was sure to offer abundant scope for such a study; abundant freedom, also, since none of the poets under scrutiny was still ...”

“... someone guided by a crude ideology which made up for its total lack of intellectual substance by a self-affirming radicalism. His worldview was simplistic and devoid of coherence, let alone plausibility. He attributed all the evils of his time to the sinister operations of world Jewry and Bolshevism, which he saw as closely intertwined, and bent on destroying ...”

“... of empire, helping to define the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In ...”

“... addressed as if it were produced in a void, and each individual novel is treated as if it were self-sufficient, and bore little relation to anything beyond the reality, or fantasy, that it described. When critics look into Narayan’s work, it’s as if they see only themselves: the ‘timeless India’ they discover in his fiction is a mirror, or a ...”

“... practices and institutions which embodied both this ‘universal’ patriotism and a desire for self-improvement were forged from a sturdy amalgam of tradition, religious observance, deference, support of the military, pride, dislike of change and adherence to class and community. The brass band movement in particular conformed to Orwell’s view of ...”

“... 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee also ...”

“... full of irritating sub-Joycean rhymes and puns, seem the work of a writer struggling to fulfil his self-imposed schema. Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s third novel, has the most elaborate schema of all: six narratives embedded one within another, like a set of Russian dolls. The journal of an American notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s is interrupted ...”

“... about welfare are likely to focus on the extent to which depending on others has to erode the self-respect of recipients and undermine the respect others have for them. Sennett thinks it quite possible for welfare agents, social workers and volunteers to treat their clients with respect, but doing so requires that they not blot out or occlude the ...”

“... that the existence of slavery undercut the moral legitimacy of the white South’s claim to self-determination. Fair enough, except that the same could be said of the Revolutionaries of 1776, most of whom were slaveholders. In the end, Farber’s discussion of secession reveals the enduring power of Lincoln’s idea that the US is not like other ...”