“... loudly debated Visconti and Bergman, while the latter stared at the snow and shared booze, smoking self-rolled cigs and spitting. Every member of the Union was entitled to invite one adult guest. One evening, in late December 1980, just a few days before New Year’s Eve, my friend Liuba, a young animator artist, called to remind me to bring my passport to ...”

“... MotoringTom PaulinOr Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to tracethe Burma Campaign the war woundelocution lessons All Soulsthe office it’s a long way from Co ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about great players and great goals and great matches, but it is also about football as a tool for self-projection and for influence-peddling, about the role it has played in nation-building and about the role it increasingly plays as countries negotiate their positions in a globalised world’. West Germany’s half-apologetic victory in 1954, for ...”

“... of the Fairies draped adoringly round his stupidity, in a way that the character’s own refined self would have been shocked by if he could ever have conceived it, but which the poet’s own even more refined self saw as a good, human (which is, creaturely) truth about love.I don’t want to work through all the ...”

“... affliction of her deare Husband, & all her Relations; but of none in this world more than my self, who lost the most excellent, & most estimable friend, that ever liv’d: I cannot but say my very Soule was united to hers, & that this stroake did peirce me to the utmost depth.’ During the years in which Evelyn saw Margaret most frequently the diary is ...”

“... with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and small-town societies were rich in resentments, ancestral curses and fears of the ...”

“... is the biography of his style. Yet style is a manifestation of much more than a writer’s own self-fashioning: it speaks of the places he has been and is coloured by what happened there, and in that way comes to define the rhythms of his prose and the patterns of his belief. A biography of Hemingway’s style will amount to nothing if it can’t exhume ...”

“... underwent a dramatic change of character, sounding more like the populist Sun than its former self, as it ventured deep into come-off-it-mate territory. Headlines promised revelations about ‘Tory Country Gents’, ‘Toffs’ and ‘Grandees’. In the Telegraph of old, such people were meant to be its readers; now the paper used Google Earth to zoom in ...”

“... Fairness stands at some remove from social utility, and more remote still are concerns about the self-respect of the individual. These incommensurables complicate the discussion of responsibility, though not, of course, among practising politicians. Furthermore, Brown notes that philosophers distinguish carefully between ‘brute luck’ (over which nobody ...”

“... into cowardice, and at an inconceivable price. This, as much as anything else, accounts for his self-loathing, and the masochistic pleasure he seems to take in it. He is a shameless voyeur who hasn’t a shred of respect for Genevieve; a lecher who fantasises about his sister and the 16-year-old daughter of the owner of the Persian restaurant where he works ...”

“... of it is extremely funny, most of the time on purpose, as it plots its antihero’s cynical and self-serving efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at ...”

“... paranoiac [Fliess] fails,’ he wrote to Sándor Ferenczi in 1910. It is on Freud’s eminently self-serving interpretation of his relationship with Fliess that Ernest Jones and Ernst Kris, editor of the censored version of Freud’s letters to Fliess, relied when, at the beginning of the 1950s, they constructed the myth of Freud’s ...”

“... founded, in 1951, on just such an ‘as if’, with critics writing as if films – not just self-evidently artistic statements, but also seemingly disposable Hollywood genre movies – could be taken as seriously as classical tragedy. And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al ...”

“... unmistakable) changes of expression. Simon says Marlo represents ‘that strange combination of self-love and self-loathing that rarely dares speak its name openly’. This makes sense, and Simon should know. But it isn’t quite what we see. What we see is a man who is wary but confident; elegant; not cruel, merely (from ...”