“... lesser eccentricity; the rumours that he fed his children a diet of potatoes to accustom them to self-denial and habitually ate his own dinner in dyspeptic solitude are vehemently denied: all these tales are traced back to a disgruntled former nurse. To compensate for the loss of these gratifying slanders, Barker supplies innumerable instances of ...”

“... of art after 1923 (a partial one, as it turned out) is attributed here to his conception of the self as an essence that is sullied by the process of creation. (Chess was a cleaner alternative – what was visible exactly mirrored the thought behind it, itself subject to preordained rules.) Seigel also invokes the bohemian tradition of declaring oneself an ...”

“... Shaw before him, he has obviously been convinced by his own brilliance. There are few signs of self-doubt here. He begins with a strong affirmation about the importance of ‘the battle of ideas’, suggesting that parties which win it can ‘stay in office for a generation’. Yet he maintains that, even after 18 years in government, ‘Conservatives can ...”

“... indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where this can be done without great cost to ourselves. For example, most people would agree that a bystander has a duty to rescue a child ...”

“... British coal then suffered a decline in production and employment so nicely paced, and a series of self-inflicted wounds so exquisitely contrived, that the Second World War and the period of reconstruction which followed were marked by one continuing crisis of productivity. Though some sort of stability was seemingly restored to a steadily shrinking ...”

“... letters, more convincingly argued that Thomas equally wished to preserve his marriage, and that self-blame (as ever) dominated his state of mind. Edward Thomas’s obsessions were rarely monorail: they exhausted all the possibilities and exhausted him. Frost conceived ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a satire on his friend’s scrupulosity about the ...”

“... which might well have led him, had he kept his health, to have given up writing poetry altogether. Self-criticism never really helped him, and he could not see how the incongruous factors in ‘St Agnes Eve’ nonetheless worked together to make it the kind of masterpiece adored by the Victorians. Porphyro, ‘brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ in ...”

“... a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous ...”

“... their destruction. He, too, documents a sad tale of personal betrayal, compromised principle and self-deception, emplotting his own story as Clinton’s campaign aide, director of communications and senior adviser as an uneven, but ultimately friendship-shattering process of disillusionment with the man whose career he once so ardently forwarded. Where ...”

“... else in the lobby is a giant lizard. Material which in other hands would be solipsistic and self-serving – there is, after all, nothing as boring as other people’s drug stories – has always been anchored by Thompson’s journalistic skill. His gift for reporting, his humour and political sense have made his ‘gonzo’ version of the New ...”

“... like Philip Hensher (who twice rehashed Leavis’s line that the ‘set’ were not artists but self-publicists) and Waldemar Januszczak (‘Bloomsbury. Just tapping out these ten tedious letters has brought on a severe attack of RSI’). Yet in truth – to throw off my coat entirely – I find myself readily empathising with that last remark, more ...”

“... remarkable chapters in British working-class history: an avowedly Marxist movement of workers’ self-education, proletarian in both composition and leadership, which had endured for over twenty years and at its height had had over thirty thousand subscribing to its courses; and perhaps more extraordinary, given the allegedly empirical character of the ...”

“... literary criticism on the ‘alternative terrain of scientific knowledge’; three since, self-canonised, he included his name in a list of major Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century. The Function of Criticism is a history of three centuries of English criticism in little more than a hundred pages. Its conceptual basis seems (not for the first ...”

“... to feel. In this null condition, he does not distinguish between Doctor Ransome, the Brownlow who self-sacrificingly protects him, and the Fagin-like American seaman, Basie, who loots his way through the course of the novel. (Jim first encounters Basie ripping gold teeth from Chinese corpses.) Jim somehow survives internment, death marches and a final bizarre ...”

“... area of initiative in the field of schooling’ that was left to the working class. Self-taught men, or disabled workers able more or less to read and write, could set up as teachers. (Parents, too, might exercise initiative: in a Scots mining village a succession of dominies was expelled with showers of stones.) More books were becoming ...”