“... that toad down there is me. Corbière’s wingless toad-poet knows how to aggravate his self-disgust into a more generalised disdain. Verlaine, who was the first to write about Corbière, called him ‘le dédaigneux par excellence’. It was a tribute to the superlative quality of Corbière’s manner, but it doesn’t tell us the whole story of ...”

“... destructive, if not sadistic, acts. The younger girl, Mary Bell, was equally pretty but eerily self-controlled and thought to be the more intelligent and influential of the pair. Bell was found guilty on both counts of murder. She was described as ‘psychopathic’ and ‘very dangerous’. Referring to the second murder, she said in the open, adult ...”

“... he pretend it will, that when he explains the naming of the names it is not in a spirit of feeble self-justification, but in terms of an apostasy that has been carefully charted throughout the book. It could have been no such thing to his former friends and partners in the Group, or the collective Theatre in Action, or even the later Actors’ Studio. He is ...”

“... beauty of a Tess of the d’Urbervilles: but Juanito’s fickle love for her combines the self-indulgence of a spoilt young man with a trace of the intellectual delusions of an Angel Clare. In making love to Fortunata he thinks he is making contact with the spirit of the pueblo, that raw, unpolished stone-quarry from which the marble of civilisation ...”

“... she argues, are being condescending when they dismiss ‘thrift, prudence, diligence, temperance, self-reliance’ as exclusively bourgeois virtues imposed on the Victorian poor as a measure of social control. True, Victorian middle-class reformers were eager to create a ‘moral citizenry’. But many workers responded to their efforts because they too ...”

“... concepts and language shows that she’s aware of that. But her characters are living in a self-imposed anachronism. Their situations have been created by choice. Other options have been – and to an extent still are – open to them, but it takes them a long time to realise it. Kate Bain, of The Men and the Girls, gives up a difficult but ...”

“... colleague – as well as to a definite reluctance to rescue that colleague from his projected self-destruction. The story of murder in the quad – did Dover (then President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) drive the vulnerable historian Trevor Aston to his grave? – has already become part of this book’s mythology. But, as far as I can see, Dover ...”

“... as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a potent ingredient of literary popularity. Everyone has something to look back on, and to be sorry for themselves about; and Connolly acted as a focal point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary ...”

“... for almost everything that ails you. For the Jews, however, there is only a single very busy, self-important and fractious God. So it seemed to me when I was young. I was troubled by the unreliability of prayer, rather as one feels anxious about sending important letters to large organisations. Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint. I first read the diary ...”

“... to endorsing it. Front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves, but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible. As he plods doggedly through his 11 years editing what he describes as one of the most influential newspapers on earth, he is continually dumbfounded by the sheer scale of his achievement. He became editor in October ...”

“... Outland in Willa Cather’s A Professor’s House). In literature, it is more delightful to lose a self than to gain one. In Play It As It Lays (1970) a guest at a good hotel glamorously descends into dementia: The room was painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread. Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could ...”

“... to fan mail (‘as many as two hundred letters a day’). The themes of these books – isolation, self-reliance, initiation – recur in his new memoir. So, too, do scenes of fantastic adventure and danger. The distinguishing feature of the new memoir – distinguishing it as a book for adults – is its depiction of sex, though this sex involves Paulsen’s ...”

“... a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations imply two quite different answers to the question of whether understanding magic is compatible with believing in it. Thomas ...”

“... of one of the large Israeli parties or of Arafat’s PLO, but as an intellectual who speaks for self-determination through citizenship and equality for Jew and Arab. He is as much a threat to the established Arab order as he is to Israel. In Nazareth that night he introduced me to a polite but inquisitive crowd. I mentioned that the event was something of a ...”

“... People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by the self-taught in opposition to the academy, but popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern ...”