“... opinion both of himself and of those of whom he approved or disapproved. Though, like other self-fashioners (Petrarch was his chief model among moderns), he altered and suppressed much in his letters when he published them, these letter-collections offer us a contemporary portrait unrivalled in its detail by any other. He found time to expound the ...”

“... background provides an unusual identity-humus. What he likes most about New York is its anonymity. Self-consciously nationalist intellectuals are often susceptible to cosmopolitanism: secretly (or in Said’s case openly) they feel most at home on the neutral terrain of exile and alienation. The very mechanism of identification – ‘standing up for’ a ...”

“... enthusiasm that this engendered, the association that arose then between German self-determination and liberalism and democracy, determined the political and cultural loyalties of the Jews of Austria thereafter – at any rate of the Jews of Western Austria. German-Austrian liberalism was, at the very least, their enemies’ enemy, an ally ...”

“... with shadows and changing reflections threaten the citizen’s most elementary weapon of self-defence: memory.’ Acutely and characteristically, he links passivity to unemployment, and the argument moves off from the dubious ‘politics of spectacle’ into the world Ascherson so insistently dissects, the one in which most people are without ...”

“... he was 21, the excuse for a course he probably would have followed anyway. Having invented a new self, made himself a changeling, he seized on the falsification attending his birth to slam the door of the past behind him for ever. Some years earlier, he had discovered that his mother’s first name was not Lilian, as she had pretended, but Letitia. Perhaps ...”

“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

“... is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at ...”

“... by rewriting his letters for publication, a deft editorial feat which transformed whining self-pity into manly resolution. But he could hardly disguise the mutability of his religious allegiances. Educated by Jesuits, he switched to Lutheranism in 1572, when a professorship at Leiden offered him an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was ...”

“... literature then leaving the presses: he was rude, opinionated, intolerant, arrogant, egotistic, self-inflating, even megalomaniac. He could think and talk only of himself, one heard, refused to admit that he had ever made a mistake or that any of his plans developed in a way he had not foreseen, and arrogated to himself all credit for any success achieved ...”

“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”

“... George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war ...”

“... the neurologist concluded: ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem Miss Didion admitted: ‘whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say, after 200 pages of these high-profile musings, that ...”

“... from that world. He was not a bit like Tolstoy or Turgenev, always immanent in what they wrote, self-creating, self-justifying. He was more like his own hero Pushkin, from whom he drew such inspiration, in the way he could get the most out of his subject, find the right objective scenario for the point to be made. As an ...”

“... he does a tremendous job: this is a convincing argot for the age in question. The suffering and self-conscious first-person singular manifested in Dyer could be considered a creation of the Gothic novel that came after him, and Dyer can also bring to mind the magus of a time before. But there is no nagging sense of anachronism. How could there be? the novel ...”

“... reason to resist if they can’. Note that, by ‘Sufficient reason’, Nagel means, not ‘self-interested reason’, but ‘good reason’, or ‘justification’: the rich plainly have a self-interested reason to resist what he thinks they could not reasonably (that is, with good reason) resist and the poor a ...”