“... not having had any Swallows and Amazons, and I open up to one of the lesser literary attributes, self-pity, when I think of some of the things we were exposed to so young. But it was quite common. The most popular picture round our way – every family had one, usually above a three-bar fire – was a commercial painting called The Weeping Boy. There were ...”

“... economic thought is shaky, they also fail to grasp why Keynes rejected the idea that markets are self-stabilising. Throughout Animal Spirits they portray him as reintegrating psychology with economic theory. No doubt this was one of Keynes’s goals, but it is not his most fundamental revision of economic orthodoxy. Among his other accomplishments he was the ...”

“... promotion of his own work and that of his coterie, does style really mean much more than self-advancement? In one way, no. With its emphasis on the men and women who populated the scene in London between 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a ...”

“... isn’t happy, how can we be? Freud, in accordance with his reality principle (good title for a self-help bestseller, there), explained that the aim of psychoanalysis was to transform ‘hysterical misery into common unhappiness’. That, like ‘good enough’ mothering, always seemed a reasonable and graceful objective. But Rubin is more ambitious and ...”

“... professionalise their operation. The army had far greater firepower than the police; the narcos’ self-defence strategies would have to be more sophisticated. Money wasn’t the problem: the production, export and import of drugs generates more than enough to arm a criminal gang, and it would be no trouble at all to pay higher salaries than the Mexican army ...”

“... Lexicon (Pangaean is a universal language, à la Esperanto). The Teleportation Accident has the self-help book Dames! and How to Lay Them: Want to impress a dame the morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she’s still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That’s one of every type of egg on a ...”

“... provided with girlfriends. We know from Slipstream, Howard’s autobiography, that Louise is a self-portrait. Something like this seems to have happened with her father, and perhaps she blamed her mother (women’s ‘frigidity’ has been made to answer for a lot), though the shadow fades in the later books, almost as if it’s been forgotten. And the ...”

“... Earls Court, and a legal action brought by Finlay against Fulcrum Press had triggered a savage and self-inflicted defeat for the progressive side. One notable antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was ...”

“... and beat them senseless. The cultivated one was Philip’s Russian-descended mother, Ida, a self-improving, self-educated enemy of the three Ks of domesticated womanhood – Küche, Kirche, Kinder – who would dispatch her children to long summer camps and go off on part-time degree courses on her own. She wasn’t a ...”

“... No hope for the future.” At least he could garden.’ Letters are performances of the self, of course, and Beckett knew what he was at, including flirting with self-parody. His long-time confidante and lover, Barbara Bray, well understood the game by the time she received this jolly missive from Porto Santo near ...”

“... Similar ideas about vigorous and slovenly peoples caught on quickly in colonial Africa. Zulus were self-evidently ‘martial’, even though they loafed around with their cattle; Hausa and Fulani in Nigeria were, in the words of Stuart Stephens, ‘bonny fechters’. But Churchill and his followers failed to win their case. Too many British top brass and ...”

“... wrote (in a piece in the London Magazine in 1979) that Quin ‘was not one of those authors who self-consciously strove to be an innovator, rather she had to seek a different form for each theme which occupied her mind’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first reading her novels, the people I knew who liked that kind of thing were mostly ...”

“... 2001. Whatever the reasons, everyone agreed it was a disaster: the party soon began its routine of self-abasement and mutual recrimination. Yet this wasn’t simply a Labour wipeout. The party retained and won mayoralties, and expanded its reach in Manchester, aided by a phenomenally popular mayor, Andy Burnham. Preston, long regarded as a test bed for the ...”

“... said to connote authoritarianism; even better, his brother Alexander, a naturalist, geographer and self-consciously anti-colonialist explorer, remains popular in Latin America to this day (Cuba has a large Alejandro de Humboldt National Park). In Germany itself, Alexander is held up in popular science and children’s books as a forerunner of climate ...”

“... exact, but his mild-mannered arguments culminate in emphatically radical conclusions. His sober, self-effacing prose leads the reader through a series of intricate theoretical inquiries until the trap is suddenly sprung and one is faced with the most provocative claims: chaos and tumult are to be applauded; the more nihilistic the world grows, the better; we ...”