“... the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist, Comstock, one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden ...”

“... heard a shaheed’s parent say, in private, “I am happy” or even “I am proud.”’ Self-selecting groups who decide what is sacred and what is not are often at odds with the communities from which they’re drawn. Atran has spoken to sources in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, where Islamist movements enjoy broad support, but he’s only ...”

“... not entirely unpriggish, since it goes along with a deep hostility to aristocratic leisure and to self-indulgences of all sorts) underpins many of the ethical judgments in the Lives, and indeed runs through the detail of its phrasing. Pope was ‘fretful, and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful’. That phrase ‘allowed ...”

“... an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist superficially the opposite of the novelist we’ve come to know. The eerily blank and neutral creations of Jed Martin imply a placid acceptance ...”

“... level the story he has to tell is unusually interesting, beginning with that intellectually self-improving father. His parents were assimilated German-speaking Jews, Habsburg subjects before 1919, and thereafter citizens of the new state of Czechoslovakia (where it seemed wise to speak Czech, at least in public). Prague in the interwar years was ...”

“... helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm. A vortex of self-inflating cartoon energy always seen to be doing something dramatic where no intervention is required, or burying inconvenient papers, facts and people, when the real problems of the disintegrating megacity could not be ameliorated by a visible headline ...”

“... fine detail of the everyday, delighting in twisting clichés against themselves, clinical, witty, self-deprecating, judging. The voice was there; the characters, I thought, were obliged to dress themselves in it, each one a different hero. Rab Hines, the working man with the young family, in The Busconductor Hines (1984); Tammas, the young gambler of A ...”

“... had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an arriviste; though whether one regarded him as a self-serving upstart intolerably ornamented with the privileges of his betters, or as a bold new talent who might be capable of securing a Protestant succession against the popish corruption of the older nobility, depended on one’s allegiance. In 1575, the ...”

“... first ones to have sex’ – to which his ex-wife Ann Birstein responded: ‘Talk about self-made men’), and it was through his reviews that he was able to respond to the shifts in the fates of that generation. When the Menshevik New Leader began to support the McCarthyist crusade in the early 1950s, Kazin announced that he would no longer ...”

“... in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts as self-contained structures, accepted only internal evidence, and ignored cultural context. The division of labour between textual editors and literary critics made no sense to him, because ‘the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic ...”

“... based on a different kind of inner discipline, a confrontation of the conflicting desires in the self, and a willing dispossession which comes close to Gandhi’s ideas of passive or non-violent resistance. Those who have been the objects of exclusion and derision are already freer, Woolf suggests, from the ‘unreal loyalties’ that prompt ...”

“... and taking him back to Haddam for a year or two. To this end, he packs a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and tries to work up seasonal pep talks ‘under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence”’. Frank also has a rubric for this stage of his life, ‘a time I think of as the Existence ...”

“... a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to ...”

“... sensible was that the person before us was a Smiths fan too – the ultimate fan – and his self-disgust and neuroses seemed to puncture the ethos of the 1980s rather nicely. The fans were outfanned by the object of their fanaticism: here was a pop phenomenon made up of pop phenomena – Morrissey’s influences were the whole point of him, it ...”

“... Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis), a composite creature marked by its blend of glib Marxism, shameless self-advertising and large quantities of indifferent verse. As the popular label for the period suggests, Auden was from the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly came to be seen as being in a class of his own. MacNeice was, in ...”