“... studied, affected, textually pleasuring itself in its redundancy; and ditto the luxuriating self-interrogation. This sort of tone is not the main thing Castle means when she cites Edward Said in praise of ‘worldliness’, but it’s connected: ‘gay men,’ she mock-complains, ‘have always seemed to monopolise the wit-and-sophistication ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of certain unworldly townlands in Donegal, along with the rest of the country. In his view, the self-contained community might grow stagnant and pigheaded: ‘Nothing was right with his people ... unless it was what went on always.’ One of his novels, The Big Windows (1955), is set in a crabbed valley in which life takes a turn for the better at the ...”

“... off Australia’s west coast on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... great advantage of The Same and Not the Same is that it seems unlikely to create a readership of self-made men who believe they have original ideas, after reading one or two popular essays. The book points out that to acquire the simplest possible view of a carbon atom or molecule takes some ten years, not only of learning, listening and reading, but also of ...”

“... Easy’ is a woman writer’s fantasy of the zipless book, of the writing that comes from feminine self-indulgence, from doing exactly what you want. Words flow from the female body like blood or milk, and men come to serve and worship, not to censor. The body is timeless, maternal, a cradle of imagination which makes writing play. These flattering images of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of America. She was shocked by the ‘overabundance of everything’ and the ‘complete self-confidence of individuals’. She told her brother and sister that most of New England is ‘wasted’. ‘It makes nonsense,’ she added, ‘of all the world-planning talk about cultivating the desert and the jungle – all they have to do is to cultivate ...”

“... most of it, a broken string. These extras undermine or spook what is otherwise a portrait of two self-satisfied young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied ...”

“... that alternative: an alternative which might be Britain’s – open, dynamic, entrepreneurial, self-confident, rich. When Blair went to America after 11 September he left his heart in Washington. He recently told the House of Commons that the alliance with the United States was a matter of faith; and I cannot think of another of our ‘allies’ for whom ...”

“... relationship. Both end with an ambiguous moment of transformation and a kind of dissolution of self, a breaking of bonds. Messud tells the ‘simple tale’ of Maria Poniatowski, a Ukrainian by birth, whose life in Canada begins only after a series of displacements, incarcerations and escapes. Her native village is first ‘restructured’ as a collective ...”

“... most memorable Londoners we encounter is a melancholic and affected writer called Stokes – the self-proclaimed ‘lion of literary London’. He was lying on the ottoman, swathed as profoundly as a pasha . . . His glittering pointed slippers, curling at the toes like those of some evil genius of the pantomime, were as villainous as a moustache. On his ...”