“... behaviour – cynical, baffled or plain incompetent – of the collection of Oxford graduates and self-made men who sat in its Cabinets. The Party, one might conclude, survived because it gave its poorer supporters just enough, and presented a humanitarian and liberationist face to middle-class campaigners. ‘The Government,’ Ponting points out, ‘had a ...”

“... concierge. Not Chester’s fault who has behaved wonderfully, but just the sufferings of the self-sufficient schizophrenic caught at last. I never really loved anyone before, and then when he got through the wall, he became so much part of my life that I keep forgetting that he is a separate person, and having discovered love, I have also discovered what ...”

“... in modern fashion, about which Rawsthorn’s book is fairly rudimentary, conventional and often self-contradictory, but of the modern fashion business, its development, its operations, its force, and their effects on the public and on its own personnel. Yves St Laurent is the name of a designer, and also of an international, multi-million-dollar fashion ...”

“... a madhouse cell in an attempt to make contact with a sympathetic reader, Castel is agonised by self-rebuke: ‘It was I who killed you, I, who saw you mute and anxious, but could not touch you through the wall of glass. I, so stupid, so blind, so incredibly selfish and cruel!’ His inability to sustain a settled union with someone else is naturally ...”

“... Chief among these is ‘sprawl’, defined as ease, cheerful excess, unbuttonedness and unsnobbish self-confidence: ‘Sprawl is really classless ... Sprawl is loose-limbed in its mind.’ Murray’s verse really does sprawl, and there’s a lot of it: some is blustery, sloppy or hard to listen to. His work flaunts its roughness, its male friendliness, its ...”

“... of chance encounters with the surviving actors in the drama, who proceed to press upon him their self-justifications and confessions. Anton’s meetings with Mr and Mrs Beumer (who lived in the first house on the left), with Fake Ploeg’s son, with Cor Takes, one of the two Communists who shot Ploeg, and, finally, with Karin Korteweg, Mr Korteweg’s ...”

“... of any delicacy.’ Nearly half a century later, he reprinted this passage in his book Sixteen Self Sketches and added: ‘When I wrote this in 1901, I did not believe that an author so utterly void of delicacy as Sigmund Freud could not only come into human existence, but become as famous and even instructive by his defect as a blind man might by writing ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... the Conservative meltdown and the dismissal of the sorriest rump of chancers, carpet-baggers and self-serving apologists ever inflicted on a passive democracy. The relish with which I looked forward to my site visit was seasoned with a nip of low-level guilt. Everything I knew and everything I had found out about the New Millennium Experience confirmed it as ...”

“... new advertising venues, like Mademoiselle, one of the postwar places devoted to a new sort of self-making. Capote did not reflect a generation, as Fitzgerald had done, or seek to scrub the world new with carbolic silences, like Ernest Hemingway, or to turn things upside down, like James Baldwin. His political triumphs would be in the manner of his small ...”

“... The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.’ This passage, with its ...”

“... puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse.Weather is made up of self-contained paragraphs like the following, which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings ...”

“... the usual story of the worldly sage and his impressionable pupil, however. Friedel was insecure, self-conscious about his stutter and his looks (which were ‘extraterritorial’, according to Adorno), while Teddie, whom the sociologist Leo Löwenthal described as ‘the pampered young gentleman from a well-to-do family’, was rarely troubled by ...”

“... flight was, in its way, a tribute to the role she had played in the household and a subconscious self-indictment. Years later he returned, but it was too late. They didn’t need him any more. The boys had been taken in by an aunt and the girl had gone to live with her grandmother. Of the boys, Satyam was cleverer, a dreamer whose discovery of modern Telugu ...”

“... universality to itself, which is what philosophers get paid to do, but it is also histrionically self-flagellating: the combination of ‘impressing’ and the ‘human subjection to words’ has a faint flavour of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ to it, as though words, unreadable by the victim, are inscribed in his body by a diabolical machine, ripping ...”