“... smile and considerable charm . . . He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket.’ In the Sudan in 1936 he still wore a white sweater with the Old Etonian colours. Later yet, he voted Liberal because Jo Grimond was an Old Etonian. The school gave him a taste for ...”

“... well beyond discomfort, impatience or rage. He appears to be involved in a protracted, existential self-immolation. He is in a hurry to reach death, but not before capturing the reader with the spectacle of his pyre. Petri wasn’t one to hedge his bets, and if his political dissent were not enough to trouble the censors, the sexual content of the poetry, or ...”

“... themselves possess.’ The bizarre possibility that Phillips intended to write an autobiographical self-help book rather than a novel may be the reason this book is so different in style from her previous fiction. Like Kate, Phillips married a doctor with two sons and became pregnant while caring for her mother through the terminal stages of cancer. MotherKind ...”

“... fictional interaction between the characters. Even so, Finkielkraut, who is portrayed as a self-important, power-hungry hypocrite, was not amused. ‘I am appalled,’ he told L’Express. ‘I have the unpleasant feeling of having been entirely dispossessed of myself.’ In the past, he complained, literature ‘at least had some relationship with ...”

“... enemies, then and afterwards, and there were whispers at the time that his wife was a cross and self-centred snob. John Sutherland’s vigorous account of Scott, published in 1995, broke ranks and was a welcome swerve from hagiography; studies of his in 19th-century publishing had delivered an earlier essay on Macrone. An acid test for the degree of candour ...”

“... to the ailing postbox and … The tuna-based salad, which renders the speaker insane, is pure self-indulgence, an excess which renders the author mildly insane too. There’s a Gogolian needlessness about it: reasonably funny in itself, but as a description of the writer’s own cackling momentum, completely winning. Like Dudley Moore, Barker is a ...”

“... But I was soon persuaded that the only sensible way to oversee financial markets is statute-backed self-regulation. It can’t be left to civil servants round whom the traders will run effortless rings. And it can’t be left to practitioners, who in an intensely competitive environment will inevitably subordinate the public interest to their own to a greater ...”

“... doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days:I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write.On Monday a man came to talk to her about depression and the ...”

“... behind the door. Góngora’s work is teasingly autobiographical. There is, for example, a witty self-portrait in the 1587 romance ‘Hanme dicho, hermanas’ (‘Sisters, they tell me’): He’s a ferocious poet, if there’s any in Libya, and when he’s seized by the poetry mania he’ll produce you loose verse as if he’s been purged, while with carob ...”

“... his friends better than the reader does. The vicissitudes of loserdom are described with wit and self-awareness. ‘I admit it tho, I’m getting too distracted now. Jesus. It’s not like a walkthrough anymore – more like a forum for some guy with Attention Deficit Disorder.’ The occasional descents into self-pity are ...”

“... matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation. The crusade against the trade and the government’s eventual response offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s ...”

“... the overcrowding there. As a result, the model housing project has been presented as a bourgeois self-delusion, all the worse for being provided by private companies offering a low but guaranteed return to investors (an exact counterpart, in fact, to today’s ‘ethical’ investments). And yet, these blocks would soon have stopped going up if nobody wanted ...”

“... two countries, Turkey and China, in chapters combining genuinely interesting information with self-indulgent asides. It’s puzzling that he doesn’t mention recent cases in which the Turkish government successfully secured the return of antiquities from several leading American museums, such as the statue of Herakles from the Museum of Fine Arts in ...”

“... thinks – that ‘the very first foundation of virtue is the endeavour to preserve the individual self.’ This may sound like an extraordinary anticipation of neo-Darwinism; but it isn’t what Spinoza said. Damasio takes the trouble to refer to the Latin of the Ethics, but gets it slightly wrong: his ‘individual ...”

“... kin. The only unfamiliar diagnosis he offers is that Africa, unlike Europe, has no tradition of self-criticism, and perhaps that is ‘why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind’. But this is doubtful: the cultural capacity for self-criticism is a splendid thing, but many parts of the world where it ...”