“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... book, or is this all just a waste of time?’ I reassured him. In view of Shelton’s immature self-assurance (he has just described the Dylan-Baez relationship as ‘one of the most intriguing show-business liaisons of the times’, a phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... long stretches his writing, where it’s not show-off clever, is appallingly careless. The plot is self-indulgently romantic, and Stern’s escapades in Africa are about as believable as Indiana Jones’s. Much of the narrative is propelled by petty spites (against feminism, notably). But with all its faults, News from Nowhere seems to me to be that rarest of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never flags, his melodious voice booms on, wowing sympathetic audiences all over the world. In 1946, already into his seventies, he gave a prizefighter’s salute to a crowd of thirty thousand inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing ...”

“... with books, perhaps, or at least ‘high’ literature, that drives so much of Werther’s self-image. He loves poetry, especially Homer and Ossian but also Lessing and Klopstock. His story raises the question of whether too much reading, or a certain kind of reading, is healthy or dangerous for the unformed personality. Rousseau had asked the same ...”

“... the decision to make New Orleans the new capital, unless one considers cunning in the service of self-interested ambition an ineluctability of history.’ Certainly Bienville’s self-interest was important, but does any historian not consider human self-interest an ‘ineluctability of ...”

“... policy in the Middle East since World War Two: naivety compounded by miscalculation and domestic self-interest, creating situations that Washington attempts to redeem by plunging deeper into only dimly understood conflicts. In 1956, problem number one for the US in the Middle East was Nasser, the charismatic, capricious and very ambitious Arab ...”

“... Without being timid about his own artistic worth, he largely resisted the normal mechanisms of self-promotion. He turned down the Légion d’Honneur (while accepting foreign honours with no cachet in Paris), refused to have anything to do with musical cliques, detested deference or homage, and was so secretive (if that’s the right word for simply not ...”

“... She’s just as persuasive now in throwing doubt on the other prime suspect, a ‘would-be wit and self-serving layabout’ called William Hatchett – which leaves Hatchett with a single surviving claim to fame, as author of A Rehearsal of Kings … with the Unheard of Catastrophe of Macplunderkan, King of Roguomania, one of the anti-ministerial farces that ...”

“... department at Transport House, she felt ready for it. ‘Life at the mine had made me strong and self-reliant. I felt sure I could cope with misogynistic politicians and, indeed, with the snakes that one finds hidden in all political parties.’ Hosking – who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold ...”

“... enough for McEwan to enjoy making knowing jokes at its expense: Charlie recalls his 17-year-old self discovering literature, ‘taking an interest in imaginary people. Heller’s Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High Bouncing Lover, Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well that Ends Well’ – book titles which were all discarded early by ...”