“... from North Carolina, but it was a poor fit for the European sophisticate he’d become, however self-mockingly he inhabited the role. His writing has remained competent and straightforward, but memorable prose was never part of Sedaris’s appeal. He writes like a performer: one senses, reading his essays, that they were destined first and foremost for a ...”

“... struggles to produce the perfect work; Pieces of Light (1998), in which Ulverton makes a self-conscious reappearance; and Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), in which a man tries to write the first definitive novel of the First World War. Thorpe’s artists do not have a good time. The director in Still can’t make his film; the novelist in Nineteen ...”

“... bleeding, to the ground; she kicks him repeatedly in the ribs. The attack – for all its self-abasement – is also a riot of pleasure. ‘When I had had enough I turned to Carla,’ she says, as if she had achieved fulfilment; and then a fantasy unfolds. ‘I wanted to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the scalp the blonde hair, I ...”

“... them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and the public’s greed for the sensational and the exotic fuels it. The mandate of anthropology is so broad that it easily bursts the bounds of strict ...”

“... websites that give themselves a plug. But some authors seem nonplussed by the need for all this self-promotion, distrusting the visitors their sites may attract. ‘If you are a lazy and/or unimaginative journalist,’ A.L. Kennedy chaffs on her website, ‘you may consider using the material contained in these pages to pad out your ...”

“... than themselves. In its literature, Rose writes, the nascent Archaic polis is revealed as the self-serving construct of an aristocracy determined to protect its control of resources by preventing any single leader from growing too powerful. Its exploitation of a poorer but now partly self-conscious demos drives the next ...”

“... this assessment by subordinating his criticism to proclamations about the jailers’ right of self-defence against their inmates. It’s often claimed that Israel’s reason for escalating this punitive regime to a new level of severity was to cause the overthrow of Hamas after its 2007 seizure of power in Gaza. The claim doesn’t stand up to serious ...”

“... Englishness – as the enemy of life, love and any sort of contact with the world that is not self-protective and self-regarding. The sentences I have already quoted from the book may begin to give an idea of how fierce this attack and this regret can be. There is a clue to this development in a magnificent piece in ...”

“... perfectly tenable legal logic founded on originalist principles and what seemed to the Court to be self-evident truths about race. The torture memos produced by Bush’s office of legal counsel are ignoble, immoral and arguably plain wrong; but they are legal arguments. What then, Balkin finally asks, if a politically packed bench, using such arguments, cedes ...”

“... one in which the great scientific and literary figures are outnumbered by chancers, eccentrics and self-publicists, Holmes escapes the familiar Romantic canon and reveals the spirit of the age from fresh perspectives. If the story amounts to a chronicle of failures they are nonetheless unpredictable and sometimes delightful failures. An attempt at the altitude ...”

“... by her gender and class, persuaded her that she had found a vocation. Those who knew her as a self-effacing girl would have been astonished to learn that she became the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and a forceful figure in the gradual development of higher education for women. Sutherland’s book is mainly about her achievements, and ...”

“... and developing its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked young Spartan ...”

“... way necessary to his agitated soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet ...”

“... the unmatchedly lively letters and journals, the funniest and most consistently readable extended self-portrait in the English language. Byron’s case, however, is exceptional. Perhaps no other project of authorial self-invention has been as successful – though there is a paradox here, because these ...”

“... are at present under heavy philosophical battering, including the very idea of a stable inner ‘self’ and of a universally knowable ‘human nature’, and they deconstruct quite nicely under the Derridean wrecking ball. The Enlightenment was undoubtedly a mode of control, with its own orthodoxies. What needs to be emphasised at the moment, however, is ...”