“... of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity. Benjamin was, on the contrary, a person of the ...”

“... belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident – how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself – have now been ‘colonised’ by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on. The retreat ...”

“... the judgments of admirers, concentrating on any who had a literary name. In the poised, archly self-deprecating preface that he had written for the edition of his collected Works that he had published while still in his twenties, he had accepted the slings and arrows of the literary life with a mock sigh. I believe, if any one, early in his life should ...”

“... as ‘the principle of individuation’: that is, as what makes any particular thing its unique self. The form of a table, its having legs and a top, is universal, common to all tables; it is the timber from which it is made, Porter explains, that made it this table for early thinkers. But Aristotle was far from sure of this. The difficulty is that matter ...”

“... in those who made it. The guilty included not just Chamberlain but also a whole generation of self-serving men whose unpatriotic notion of Britain’s world role reflected a general political grubbiness. These men were mostly Conservatives, so this was a very serviceable myth for the left, but also for the new, postwar right, some of whom hoped to ...”

“... altruism were motives for the provision of free inoculation to the working classes, but economic self-interest was just as much a part of it.What caused smallpox? What were its patterns of distribution? What were the real rates of its morbidity and mortality? Physicians and philosophers disagreed over these questions and many were dissatisfied with the ...”

“... modest estimates of France’s genetic continuity. Although at times the creature of a national self-image, he was never a captive of it.Where do these retractions leave the quest for the identity of France? In the last and longest part of his work, Braudel develops the elements of another approach to it, more serious and less congenial to collective ...”

“... that has concerned me for decades. By the way, the last two sentences of that paragraph – a bit self-satisfied, blasé, easy-going despite the subject matter – could have been lifted, stylistically speaking, from either of the two novels, whose breezy, matter of fact ‘sanity’ about women who are complete wrecks and/or evil has none of the swish ...”

“... I doubted that the bouncy, healthy-looking Danes could have produced a worthwhile writer. (Their self-assurance, their cycling, their perfect teeth: where was the despair?) I never made it to the Little Mermaid, but by the time I left I’d finished Childhood. Walking the streets of Copenhagen, gloomy and bored, I had accidentally immersed myself in the Tove ...”

“... Platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have a similar effect on the presentation of the self, where the goal is to win plaudits for instantly impressive slogans and iconography. Chunks of ‘content’ – images, screengrabs of text, short snatches of video – circulate according to the number of thumbs up or thumbs down they receive.It is easy to ...”

“... in a new arrangement. Even as events seemed to tip the balance decisively in favour of national self-determination and a clean break – the Algerian war (from 1954), French withdrawal from Vietnam (1954), the independence of Morocco and Tunisia (1956), and Ghanaian independence (1957) – Senghor insisted that federation with France was essential for ...”

“... play the social game at which his friend and colleague Hubert Robert excelled. In his infrequent self-portraits, Fragonard preferred to depict himself in the same tondo format that he used to paint his wife, Marie-Anne Gérard; his sister-in-law, Marguerite (who moved in with the couple in 1775); his daughter, Rosalie; and his son, Alexandre-Évariste. These ...”

“... outcome of this sequence of events, in the course of which Henry moves from tentative dimness to self-possession. In the book’s opening words, ‘Henry Farr did not, precisely, decide to murder his wife. It was simply that he could think of no other way of prolonging her absence from him indefinitely.’ But when the book closes, Henry faces this very ...”

“... and activities of Shabbetai Tzevi, or Sabbatai Zebi (1626-76), sage, scholar, mystic, apostate and self-proclaimed Messiah, an important figure in the history of Judaism, I must confess to knowing nothing until Bernice Rubens captured my interest in the remarkable existence and rum doings of one Sabbatai Zvi, holy roller, profligate, manic-depressive, loving ...”

“... could say – a new method of imagining that one does not live for ever. For it presents to the self its own death and life. Holmes’s ending has a good deal of the quiet intensity of Johnson’s own life of Savage. ‘Finally I should say that if my book strikes some curious chord in the reader’s mind, it came to me on such a night ... in the city, when ...”