“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... transferred from oneself to a malignant world, there is no cause for personal reproach or loss of self-esteem. But while the psychological functions of compulsive exculpation are commonplace, the ability to convince others is a good deal more impressive. Thatcher’s capacity to project her own fantasy as received wisdom is the crux of this election. The ...”

“... lose, it seemed quite likely that the Labour Party would find their defeat an occasion for further self-laceration. Accusations would fly from left to right ... treachery ... stab in the back ... betrayal of the working class ... It is early days yet, of course, and Mr Scargill’s merciful absence from our television screens for the last two months does not ...”

“... whatever reason, did so knowing they would pay the price ... As often as not, their ostracism was self-imposed; they were their own worst critics. In other words, Victorian England was a society in which – as in Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social – deviants willed their own punishment because they believed that the very existence of society was predicated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... merely the obverse of anti-immigrant brutality. They share the presupposition, which is in no way self-evident, that the defence of one’s own way of life is incompatible with ethical universalism. We should avoid getting trapped in the liberal self-interrogation, ‘How much tolerance can we afford?’ Should we tolerate ...”

“... though not all were recorded as such, partly to spare the deceased the ignominy of the crime of ‘self-murder’. The city raised hopes and dashed them. In 1731, Charles Cooper, son of a Southwark cheesemonger, ‘not having his task ready, left his satchel and books at a shop, [and] flung himself into the Thames’. Drowning was by far the most common type ...”

“... every year – they remain ‘British’, for Rees-Mogg, because of their superior wealth and self-sufficiency. ‘It is the Florida effect,’ he said in a House of Commons speech. ‘People want to go to southern European countries, but they take their wealth with them, which would be welcomed even if we were not members of the EU because poor countries ...”

“... as she did say more than once – that experiencing the genius almost made up for the booze, the self-harm, the harm to others. What she seemed to care about most in life was painting. She knew what hers gained from looking at Pollock’s and resisting. The space at the Barbican is curious, and can be deadening, but on this occasion it has been put to use in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and civilians by turns contemptuous and reluctantly admiring, his motives a painful mixture of self-interest and dutiful rigour, Prior is Barker’s most compelling creation. He is a borderline figure whose brooding, antagonistic sessions with Rivers reveal a mind so at odds with itself that at times his dissociation leads to episodes in which he doesn’t ...”