“... alone in Manhattan after running away from prep school, tormented by the ‘phonys’ and the self-absorbed, like the schoolmate he calls ‘about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat’. The Glass family stories are very different. They’re all non-stop talkers in the Glass household, a family of super-smart kids who have read everything, who starred ...”

“... the EU as a kind of bulwark, a halfway house between isolation and globalisation that allows a self-image of openness to the world but has the potential to keep the world’s big non-European powers, state and corporate, at arm’s length.I confessed to Boys I’d taken a peek at his Twitter feed. The header photo is a picture of his yellow Lotus sports ...”

“... She’s playing Town; you live there too.While writing this, I read another essay that made me self-conscious; it lamented the trend toward the autobiographical review. Oh no, I said to myself, like Lenù at university, like Lila at the party, I have been doing it wrong the whole time. I went through what I had written, carefully removing the I, I, I. Then ...”

“... Memmi had known in Tunis.For Memmi, this vision rested, again, on a denial of the concrete: the ‘self-hatred’ and ‘mutilation’ of the colonised, and their desire to reclaim and assert their identities, religious and national, rather than initiate a socialist revolution. When he revisited Fanon’s work on the tenth anniversary of his death in ...”

“... with her mother, even down to the use of a pseudonym. This was one way of inhabiting a second self.Conflict between mother and daughter lies at the heart of Good Behaviour. The story mostly takes place in the 1910s and 1920s at Temple Alice, the St Charles family seat. It is narrated in retrospect by Aroon, the ‘unloveable’ daughter who has, in ...”

“... the northern provinces signed the Union of Utrecht, becoming the United Provinces, Protestant, self-governing and independent from Spain. They were thereafter definitively separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came ...”

“... with chapter endings that are just shy of cliffhangers. Its early pages seem to reflect a younger self – words such as ‘castigated’ put me in mind of a bright middle school student – and the adverbs pile up: ‘Slowly, dejectedly’, ‘painfully and begrudgingly’. There are some unfortunate flourishes: ‘My sexual spark had been crushed like a ...”

“... often reduced to a series of repudiations’. Part of what’s repudiated here is any song of the self that sits in isolation from the variousness it courts. The line-ends say it best: in the shift from the hypothetical coolness of ‘one’ to the more vulnerable gambit of the first person, and in the double life of that person himself (‘one of each ...”

“... invigilators, we encounter a brutal parody of high politics in the outside world: shame, betrayal, self-deception and the art of deceiving others, though the guards in Tazmamart were the inmates’ only public. BineBine pitied them. They were ‘the dregs of colonisation, poor wretches, who had lost their souls after selling their consciences to a system they ...”

“... Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps even more impressively, Franco. But it is true that, in democratic conditions, to be more popular at the close than at the outset of a prolonged period in office is rare ...”

“... for perjury applicable to evidence given to the Inquiry? Does the normal protection against self-incrimination apply? I have not found firm rulings on these matters, and the imprecision is, I think, deliberate. Nothing like the Bloody Sunday Inquiry has ever taken place in Britain or a Commonwealth country before, and there are no precedents. No Royal ...”

“... social services and the police. The risks she took were not reasonable in the circumstances but self-interested. If she had really cared about her baby, they argued, she would have handed her in.But Marten felt she had no choice. She wanted to have a family with Gordon: meeting him was ‘fate’, she said. She knew that any child she had with him would be ...”

“... of the new Russian liberalism will be the one its predecessor failed – real respect for national self-determination. The second will, of course, be the nature of the political system to emerge inside Russia itself. The sudden, peaceful springing into the air of Communist rule has been an extraordinary psychological liberation for its people. The freedoms now ...”

“... seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration,’ she wrote; or ‘I have a vague theory that one learns most – I have learned most – from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then. I mean about life, the world, and ...”

“... was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been helped when he received a note from McFarlane saying, ‘Here are your marks and pretty miserable they are, too.’ Others of his year with less resilience than Adam received similar notes and I find this hard to understand, let ...”