“... 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 ...”

“... freedom to invent. This isn’t done because of a shortage of real-world material, let alone from self-importance – it’s an investigation into the instability of genre and the shifting nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the ...”

“... and places few aristocrats would encounter on their Continental tours. He was chancy, observant, self-assured, kind to horses and rude to people. Hammond was born in Cambridgeshire in 1748 and grew up in a little village called Exning near Newmarket. By the time he was six he had lost his mother and three brothers; his father, penniless and out of ...”

“... poetry which similarly reveals this gift for being wrapped up in itself: he called it the ‘self-inwoven simile’, and it happened, Empson said, ‘when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough he compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature, or that it sustains itself by ...”

“... sweater; the other sports a similar ensemble in soft orange. In a cosmology so strongly based on self-presentation and personal style, it was always on the cards that the devil would wear Primark. Is it cheeky to describe this very us-and-them worldview, minimising or discounting tensions within and between minorities, as rather binary?It’s overstating the ...”

“... no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his enthusiasms. To a casual teenaged visitor his self-centredness was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for himself.Why was Sassoon like this? In the public mind he remained not only one of the most celebrated poets of the Great ...”