“... Chandler and Hammett fitted well with a postwar generation’s fidgety need to blow holes in the self-sustaining establishment. I think they were part of the equation for the brief explosion of political and social activity. In Tough without a Gun, a biography of Bogart, Stefan Kanfer is concerned that they don’t make screen idols like that any more. He ...”

“... to describe them. Like Kanner he found that these children were characteristically isolated and self-sufficient, their language often bizarre and idiosyncratic, but he also emphasised their unusual talents and abilities. To Asperger these children, unlike the children Kanner described, seemed full of potential: ‘While their language at times did not seem ...”

“... he writes, ‘mirror so clearly the American Dream of Success and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.’ Labor’s bland subtitle, ‘An American Life’, may be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,’ Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has ...”

“... simply that kind of guy waiting for an opportunity, or catastrophe, in which to develop his true self – bad luck for Mrs Kimble but a great benefit to small-town America. What is never in doubt is Kimble’s innocence. The audience is not asked to wonder about it, or even to worry much about Kimble being caught by Gerard, since that would mean the end of ...”

“... The economy started going wrong in the 1970s – Tom Wolfe’s ‘me decade’. Frivolous and self-regarding, the 1970s were also profoundly grim. It was in this decade that the American (and global) economy embarked on its fateful transformation from industrial to finance-driven capitalism and that the American working class underwent a makeover that ...”

“... heart into the earth, so it would grow. This touch of melodrama is complicated by Glück’s self-awareness about her ‘dark nature’, as in ‘“Parodos”’: I was born to a vocation: to bear witness to the great mysteries. Now that I’ve seen both birth and death, I know to the dark nature these are proofs, not mysteries – Glück likes the ...”

“... social ceremonies and mutual courtesies.’ Dickens’s birth takes the form of his father’s ‘self-consciously genteel announcement’ in the local newspapers. The second specimen, a schoolboy letter apologising for an unreturned Latin book, is an early touchstone for his imaginative life, with its whimsical wordplay and elaborate signature. It ...”

“... said, that can explain why in the last three hundred years or so we in the West have become so self-consciously liberal; liberal about thought itself, the conviction that prompted Nagel’s book, and liberal in our morals and politics. For most of the known human past this hasn’t been so, and we can’t say that our ancestors were benighted or ...”

“... is that 25-year-old Tom is insulated by wealth and education, and Felix is buoyed by the self-help mantras going through his head. Bumming a cigarette, Tom asks Felix if he can hook him up with anything stronger. ‘My girl thinks I’ve got an invisible tattoo on my forehead: PLEASE ASK ME FOR WEED.’ Felix has little trouble coming out on top when ...”

“... plans, written after a catastrophic loss. In 1919, Guthrie’s older sister, Clara, died from self-inflicted burns, having set fire to herself during an argument with her mother. In 1927, Guthrie’s father, Charley, was severely burned in another fire: everyone suspected that his wife, Guthrie’s mother, Nora, had set fire to him, but Charley refused to ...”

“... modern reader . . . uncomfortable’. To me it seems grotesquely hypocritical, devoted to self-delusion. And for Richardson to start the next paragraph with ‘James was, in fact, enormously fond of dogs’ almost comically compounds the problem. Richardson’s gestures towards a wider history are brisk and potted, and also often verge on surrealist ...”

“... departure, his fort-da. When the critics didn’t slay him, he slew himself, both through physical self-evaluation (‘My hair has gotten sort of ratty looking, my face dull and sallow, and my front teeth have two visible black cavities that I am too lifeless to have fixed’) and through literary self-disembowelment: in ...”

“... to complain that the supposedly highly centralised Reich was in practice divided into dozens of self-willed satrapies; fundamentally, one of them despairingly noted, it altogether lacked ‘a functioning government’. Mazower is on slightly safer ground when he notes that German race laws in colonies like Namibia provided a basis for similar regulations in ...”

“... can it be autonomous? And who judges such autonomy, if not a reader? How can literature be at once self-communion and communication? Henry James, the subject of Author, Author, was perhaps the first major novelist in England to confront this dilemma head-on, living as he did at a transitional point between Victorian writers, for whom it was still possible to ...”

“... as a sham. We supposed the world was getting better when all the time it was just its old grim self, if not getting worse. The years were treacherous but we, it seems, were their accomplices. We could have known, and should have known, what was happening. The autocrats were wanton, but they were only the trigger, not the cause. They allowed us to see our ...”