“... the athletics in bed which the modern novel goes in for are beginning today to sound almost as self-consciously enacted: as if there was a gap between what the writer really felt and what he expected language to do for himself and his reader. And yet that is not the case here. Reading the novel, one is convinced that Morgan, no less than ...”

“... toothache, tax bills, the loss of friends. Thoughts about oneself – in the root sense, self-ish thoughts – present no thunderous problem. No, what I am concerned with here is the ability to think about things outside one’s own self or self-interest. ‘I need some time to ...”

“... found in Schnaase, and later in Riegl and Wölfflin, of an autonomous development in art, a self-transformation: the freedom of the artist comes to imply the freedom of art. The clearest example of this autonomy is Riegl’s discussion of the development of ornamental motifs. For example, he argues that the acanthus motif emerged, not in imitation of ...”

“... power; in the second, lightness, clarity and weakness. In other words, it was both an exercise in self-ridicule and a warning.’ Everything Milosz says is light and clear; it certainly isn’t weak, but it is unemphatic, unemotional, scrupulous, fastidious, reticent. Milosz returns to this contrast on a number of occasions. ‘Nothing is more deceptive than ...”

“... to force Bowlby-stuck judges to realise that fathers can look after their children’. Self-obsession, what Christopher Lasch calls ‘pathological narcissism’, is the third cause of our advanced divorce rate. Gathorne-Hardy doesn’t mention Lasch, but in a chapter entitled ‘The Privilege Bulge’ he writes about the same ‘rage to ...”

“... other element in this narration is his friendship with the scriptwriter of the title, the tiny and self-important Pedro Camacho, an extraordinary prolific Bolivian import who writes and stars in several daily soap operas at once for the next-door Radio Central.The even-numbered chapters from two to 18 are ‘syntheses or paraphrases’ of nine of Camacho’s ...”

“... an affectioned ass.’ She insists that Malvolio’s defects spring from his own hypocrisy and self-love. They are not, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek wants to believe, associated with a particular religious and political alignment in Elizabethan England. Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s ...”

“... managed not to sound nauseatingly heartfelt. His voice lacks pretension, disclaims rhetoric and self-regard; he is, apparently, without design. The first of these moments of booming meditation was an introduction to ‘My Hometown’ (from his latest album Born in the USA), and Springsteen made it both personal and typical: he spoke of his sadness at the ...”

“... as ever, are plain enough. After 1912, without compromising his identity as a solitary tramper and self-communer, he developed a circle of new friends who helped him to make the most of his personality rather than sorrowfully submitting to the miseries it produced. With Clifford Bax he rediscovered some of his undergraduate jauntiness; in Eleanor Farjeon he ...”

“... For him, it is necessary to understand society in depth. For Dr Starkey, on the other hand, it is self-evident that, to understand political events, it is necessary to understand political circles. If Dr Starkey wishes to understand an event in a period of which he has previously known nothing, he will ask who was Groom of the Stool: Professor ...”

“... in the first days of Queen Victoria’s reign, loved men and women indiscriminately without undue self-laceration, without visible private guilt or degrading public shame’. So of course might the Dodds of today, but Gay suggests – and indeed the diary entries show it – that Dodd’s feelings were an inspiration to him, a source of psychic energy and ...”

“... of unintended promotion takes a subtler form in the case of Amis’s fictional counter-hero, John Self, the money-glutton and pornographer, a man with as much interior culture as a massage parlour. The author describes this crass compendium of gross appetites so brilliantly, and with such inventive wit, that the character comes to seem perversely deep and ...”

“... seem to have impinged less on the younger man. He was young, and coming home famous made him self-important. He had what O’Brian calls a sudden rush of pomp to the head. As a result, he missed the next boat south. A new expedition was planned. Banks demanded a larger ship and a greater degree of personal control than the Admiralty was willing to ...”

“... cryptic, the sexual relationship is fully lit. Guerrillas tells how an outcast, hustler and self-proclaimed revolutionary, Jimmy Ahmed, has returned from London to his native island, and has formed a commune for drop-out youths. He takes up with a wandering Englishwoman, Jane, who has come looking for action in the Third World and has found this corner ...”

“... sense of him looking for affection, though there is a beautiful account of his friendship with a self-assured and decidedly eccentric boy, Mickey Wall. When he introduced me to his sister, Edna, a nice but slightly irritable 19-year-old, she was bending over the fire grate. ‘This is my sister, Edna,’ he said ... I was prepared to be impressed by her ...”