“... of guerrillas, a large convoy got through, prices tumbled and the city returned to its cocky self – that of a place which still functions despite 11 years of civil war and thousands of deaths. Kabul has been written off many times. Many of its inhabitants had heard and even believed Western press and intelligence reports of its imminent fall as the ...”

“... quasi-allegorical) symbolism. In Lear, for example, ‘like Paulina, Edgar rouses indignation as a self-appointed spiritual midwife who protracts torture for the good of the tortured.’ But Edgar and Gloucester are not motivated characters in a novel. Edgar is not self-appointed to teach his father to suck eggs, but ...”

“... modest account’ of her acting career, whereas the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed ...”

“... is inhabited by many shameless hucksters who, to put the matter plainly, are unlearned, confused, self-indulgent, false, childish, suffer from illusions of grandeur and don’t write too good. Which, to be fair, doesn’t distinguish them from many of their colleagues down the hall. But the harm they do is real and appalling – less because they transform ...”

“... shows that these Gypsy-fanciers and lore-collectors were a tribe as eccentric, exclusive and self-regarding as any other. In addition to the usual scholarly disputes – the Rai fell out with his friend Bernard Gilliat-Smith over the aspirated c in Balkan Romani – there was rivalry over gaining the Gypsies’ confidence and in the open-air excitement ...”

“... of production might destroy or damage the planter’s crop. It took nerve and courage and immense self-confidence (Breen likens it to virtu) to become ‘a lord of the soil’ – that is to say, to get a good price and, equally important, to be respected for the quality of his leaf. Good management signified ‘private virtue’: to criticise a planter’s ...”

“... of my dearest wish.’ Her acceptance of his criticism is characteristic, combining disarming self-deprecation with guilt-shifting. She was always on a trapeze between humility, on the one hand, and gigantic conceit, ambition and self-deception, on the other. One entry reads: ‘I am utterly ...”

“... Daniel Farson was polite, self-deprecating, impressed by modesty and authenticity, grateful for favours, careful to keep track when it was his turn to buy drinks (which he often did). Gilbert and George, by contrast, are utterly stylised: they speak in relays, move like robots and strongly hint that there is no within within ...”

“... addicts in case she, too, comes under their spell. Anna Pavord has no such reservations: she is a self-confessed tulipomaniac. ‘There must be one or two people in the world that choose not to like tulips,’ she remarks disdainfully, ‘but such an aberration is barely credible.’ Why people avoid some plants and revere others is the subject of Frederick ...”

“... The Country House and Fraternity, is simply the criticism of one half of myself by another.’ Self-division on an artist’s part can, as we know, be a great engine for creativity. It was so with Flaubert and with Dostoevsky. But with Galsworthy the wires seem to have been fitted the wrong way, and the expected current does not flow. They have been fitted ...”

“... people perceive the seismic shift in attitudes that appears to have taken place – the loss of self-reliance, the unrealistic expectations, the disappearance of community spirit, the apparent selfishness – and as a result they blame the patients and not the disease. All of this, which is plain to those who have worked among or studied the condition of ...”

“... elegy of loss and rejection. It has the same grief, the same courage, and the same need to counter self-pity by a hard retelling of bitter memories. In her middle age and after 12 pregnancies, Ramatoulaye is suddenly rejected by her husband, who takes a new young wife. This wife is Binetou, a teenage friend of her daughter, and literally overnight Ramatoulaye ...”

“... magic by showing him to have been a little less cheerful, generous and perceptive, a little more self-concerned and self-seeking, a little more pompous and irascible, than we know him to be from the marvellous fictional edifices he built. Winston did his honest best to make him look attractive. He almost succeeds. Whether ...”

“... say stuffy figure, it was on account of these limitations. He became a Scotch gentleman of a very self-satisfied Edinburgh, having been a ruthlessly self-critical young man with scurvy spots on his fingers and wind in his stomach. David Miller has lucidly separated ‘the philosophical and ideological elements in Hume’s ...”

“... interest me more than theories’: people may indeed interest him, but the book displays a self-satisfaction which seems to have denied him much understanding of them. Alvarez would now appear to be flatly contradicting what he told us in The Savage God. Referring there to a time ‘many months’ before our separation, he wrote of his intention to ...”