“... to chat up his glamorous French co-hostess, who consistently squelched him as a total creep. This self-caricature is no more Clive James (who by his own account is clearly as attractive to foreign ladies as the next celebrity) than Edna Everage and her remarks about tinted gentlemen is the sophisticated Mr Humphries. One of James’s most effective tricks is ...”

“... of a Galsworthy or a Wells, though these novelists would have allowed their narrators a greater self-awareness than ever comes Hugh Gordon’s way. He has spent his time since leaving Oxford working in London for the Third World causes championed by his incongruously left-wing wife, and after the double failure of his marriage and his return to Starne he ...”

“... major preoccupations, and his lust for men was as distressing to him as his desire for women was self-affirming and ecstatic,’ Susan Cheever wrote in Home before Dark, published three years after Cheever’s death in 1982. It was the first public admission that ‘the Ovid of Ossining’, the man who once said his epitaph should read ‘Here lies John ...”

“... gaze, never to be seen again. Specifically, the party introduces three ‘highly-selected’ and self-made women – all contemporaries at Cambridge in the early Fifties and now middle-aged. One, Alix Bowen, wants to ‘change things’. An evangelical Leavisite, she teaches English to prisoners. Alix buries herself in Northam ‘that figurative Northern ...”

“... and the law of rape; standards of reasonableness, particularly in cases where provocation and self-defence are at issue; the position of black and Asian women and the interaction between sexism and racism; domestic violence and battered women’s syndrome, and so on. She ranges from the major questions (in what sense is crime or criminal law ...”

“... Literature, where many readers have wished to keep him suspended. Clothes exist to remind the self of the body, and to create a worldly body for each person. Anderson connects them with Kafka’s interest in bodily states and qualities, both his own and those of his characters, as well as with his literary technique, with the skilful cut of his fictional ...”

“... too much latitude in the direction of high-sounding prose. In its poetic vein his writing tends to self-parody, to be portentous, and to create an air of solemnity which tempts irreverence. Ondaatje spent eight years writing The English Patient, a fact which his publisher reports as though it somehow guaranteed the novel’s quality, making Ondaatje into a ...”

“... first has been variously interpreted: by some as naked, mean greed; by others as honourable self-deception, born of the arrogance of lust for fame. The incident becomes easier to understand when one realises that Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, though unprecedented in history, had a precedent in literature. In a Spanish version of the Romance of ...”

“... who are unhappy but not depressed (‘dysthymics’ in the esoteric language of psychiatry) great self-confidence and the ability to accept rejection without being upset. He supports this claim with a series of case-histories drawn from his own patients. Unfortunately psychiatric case-histories are a modern form of fairy story, whose fallibility is well ...”

“... at all, that her exquisite grace on screen derived from her instinctive projection of her real self. As with her fellow-narcissist Greta Garbo, the pull which Marilyn exerts for Eighties audiences has to do with a quality which throve in unreflective innocence and which is in these post-feminist days extinct. And the fascination of her story lies in the ...”

“... come to him for confidential counsel in this delicate area. There may have been a lack of full self-knowledge in such behaviour, but I cannot see that, initially at least, there need have been hypocrisy. Nothing is clearer from the record than the fact of O.B.’s possessing ‘the Socratic gift of maieusis’ that Lowes Dickinson attributes to him. Under ...”

“... class system, a wild colonial boy who stands for the ‘ordinary’ man. There is a certain self-conscious filial piety here. His father, Keith Murdoch, was partly responsible for establishing the received view of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which thousands of heroic Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed to the incompetence and ...”

“... with Dix encouraged its rivals to hire agony aunts of their own. Soon they were appearing in more self-consciously serious publications such as Lansbury’s Labour Weekly and the Miner. Though the audience for these columns was often assumed by both editors and readers to be female, half of Dix’s letter writers were male. Mainly, and predictably, they wrote ...”

“... boxes, packed away with the books, leaflets, articles, pamphlets, flyers, punk CDs and ‘Will Self Is Stupid’ badges Home gave me to help with my researches. So many different authors, formats, purports; except that all of it was really done by him. Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962, and, until recently, has lived and worked in Bethnal ...”

“... an inveterate liar is to do him less than justice. He was in fact a compulsive fantasist and self-inventor. The only child of Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement, he clung to his fantasies with such tenacity that they became the source of a precarious yet highly successful career as a writer and an authority on all matters ‘Oriental’ – a ...”