“... borough, and many of them are young Bangladeshi men. These guys are Cockneys by geography and in self-image too. Walls and bus shelters are daubed with gang names – the Brick Lane Massive, Cannon Street Posse, Stepney Green Posse and the Shadwell Crew – that recall how, long before the Krays and the Richardsons, long before Jewish boxers like Jackie Berg ...”

“... saw the Orient and its unbroken past as a foundation, a point of origin, and a parameter for the self and for creativity; there is no ‘Orient’, or ‘East’, for the medieval poets Chandidas, Vidyapati or Jayadeva, as there is, so profoundly, for Tagore. Nor would it have occurred to Chandidas to locate himself in history, and to claim and create ...”

“... of life found themselves under attack from the barren counter-energies of rationalism. His poetry self-consciously opposes what he once called, sounding just like Lawrence, ‘this rotten English civilisation’. In his most revealing interviews, conducted by the critic Ekbert Faas in the 1970s, he spoke with an angry prophetic vehemence about ‘the ...”

“... the first non-royal celebrity to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ...”

“... from his vast reading in English and several other languages into verse that seems effortlessly self-sufficient and sublime – verse that appears to transcend sources, borrowings, allusions, other than the clearly Biblical. Noting that no writer before Milton had fashioned himself ‘quite so self-consciously’ as an ...”

“... Power summarises her dispiriting conclusion this way: ‘Unless another country acts for self-interested reasons, as was the case when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, or armed members of the victim group manage to fight back and win, as Tutsi rebels did in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of genocide have usually retained power.’ But what about ...”

“... vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such self-confidence has dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of ...”

“... more. Israel hoped that the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank would provide a facsimile of self-government and a safe but ineffectual outlet for Palestinian demands for liberation. But the PA’s shortcomings kept generating justifications for more active forms of struggle, which Hamas seized on. In 1994 it conducted its first suicide bombing inside ...”

“... be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on inaccuracies perpetrated by career biographers, manipulations that nudge her out of the official portraits. Biography is serious business these days. It underwrites the republication of a ...”

“... de Man: he quarrelled over it with the august interpretations of Heidegger. There is a measure of self-absorption about even the least of these pieces. They look forward as well as back, and one of their merits is that they often demonstrate how much can be said in a review or a relatively brief essay: which explains why de Man was so slow to publish a ...”

“... While he is married to Mary, the wives in his fiction march forth as his conception of her: self-serious, clutching tight to the progressive politics she inherited from her Unitarian minister father. When he begins to feel restless at the New Yorker and moves their young family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, beach views and shingled houses and the ...”

“... published in 1937), on the excellence of his own, or indeed any, system of strenuous self-criticism and self-discipline, which should lead a writer to cut and cut again. Kipling was a man who could hardly speak of himself without ironic quizzicality, without silences and reticences. The theory of the condensed ...”

“... so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn ...”

“... at the same time leaving the original Ronnie behind and forging new connections to a plausible self. I decided his family’s address at the time of his birth would be 167 Caledonian Road, because the address seemed right in class terms for the man I was inventing and also because I have a feeling for King’s Cross. I placed him at Blessed Sacrament ...”

“... brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his ...”