“... is easy to read and enjoy, the experimenter is a hack’). But he does agree, to judge by his self-awarded grades, with the notion of a serious (if temporary) falling-off after Slaughterhouse 5, starling with Breakfast of Champions and reaching its nadir with Slaptick. D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it ...”

“... ghost-write her autobiography. That project came to naught – Carstairs was resistant to any real self-examination – but the tapes convinced Summerscale that even after this ‘self-made man’ had retreated from the public eye, she longed for applause and commemoration:I imagined that Joe Carstairs hoped on her death to ...”

“... year of life as a non-blind, otherwise healthy person is worth 1 Qaly. (These numbers are based on self-reporting by Aids patients and blind people, which raises some obvious worries. For example, dialysis patients rate their lives at 0.56 Qalys – significantly higher than the 0.39 Qalys predicted by people who don’t need dialysis. Maybe this is because ...”

“... its own”’. In Lear’s hands, the word calls up something occluded yet vital, allows self-knowledge and self-estrangement to go together; by behaving nonsensically, the human animal may get closer to becoming what he is. Lear once wrote of ‘the sense of the absurd so nearly akin to shame, on which you are ...”

“... nothing in common with the prose of real life,’ and the paradox of Eugene Onegin is that it is self-confessedly a poem simultaneously of real life and of pure fiction. These stanzas that select so much of the real constantly remind us of the fictive status of those selections – fictive because they have been so carefully selected, so artistically ...”

“... embedding her book in her political activism and youthful reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s self-loathing (or at best ambivalent) book about being old, La Vieillesse. Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable ...”

“... and sustained, as well as thwarted or jeopardised, between men and women who don’t read self-help books – just the kind who might want or need grown-up novels of love. Here is the female narrator of Mating, a graduate student in anthropology called Karen Ann (as we learn when we glimpse her as a married woman in Mortals), describing her future ...”

“... home, with his older sister and her husband and children. ‘At home he was his usual brusque self,’ his friend and fellow novelist Natalia Ginzburg, Leone’s wife, remembered. ‘He acted like a kid or an outsider.’ Most of his time he spent in his room. To pay the bills Pavese began to translate, producing stylish versions of such complex works as ...”

“... the message,’ he wrote, ‘the message is there is no message.’ Holmes wrote screeds of self-doubt masquerading as higher purpose, hunting for a vision of human worth. (He was on Sertraline, brandname Zoloft.) ‘Why does the value of a person ever matter?’ he wrote. He drew lines of matchstick men lying on their sides (‘Value = 0’). He noted ...”

“... thought also to be the addressee of Catullus’ amorous poetry. The speech, Pro Caelio, takes a self-consciously light-hearted tone in what was a very serious trial, but the playfulness has a malicious intent: noble Clodia is treated as a common prostitute and her brother as her equal and indeed partner in debauchery. By now Clodius was being challenged on ...”

“... but none of them could be regarded as the foundation of all the rest, though a few self-confounding notions such as ambiguity, irony and the ideal of speaking ‘without authority’ are intrinsic to his work. It is also difficult to decide on an internal ranking among Kierkegaard’s works; you could choose any one of his writings and make it ...”

“... never one to avoid a stand-up row about points of principle. Plenty of Protestants rejoice in a self-consciously Lutheran tradition, especially Germans and Scandinavians, and they will be the ones most readily celebrating 1517, remembering 31 October as Reformation Day, a big annual event in Lutheran Germany. Very many Lutherans of German and Scandinavian ...”

“... book presents a continuation of other mighty endeavours: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self, both studies in what it means to be an individual. In answer to this, the dwindling of trust in an immortal soul has shifted the onus onto the ...”

“... quietly. Instead he showed up for maulings in television studios and bombarded the world with self-justifying letters: yes, he had embellished his story here and there, because who would have listened otherwise? At least his intentions were pure, unlike those of his antagonists, who, he implied, had pounced on a few regrettable untruths in order to ...”

“... internment in Liverpool, she arrived in London in December 1942. When she died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on 24 August 1943, she had been separated from her parents for nine months. In London she wrote day and night, far exceeding the pedestrian reports the Free French asked her to produce. Her output in this period ...”