“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the role, Zoë Wanamaker described Viola as a catalyst who comes into a world that is stuck in self-love, mourning and convention – and makes it change. Starting the play with her arrival emphasises that reading. But it underestimates the reality of Illyria. Beginning with Viola’s question about the place, rather than Orsino’s unquestioning ...”

“... was preoccupied by the need to earn a living for his growing family while persisting with his self-analysis. The year after Anna’s birth his father died and he used the word ‘psychoanalysis’ for the first time in print (in French). These were years of real and necessary self-absorption for Freud. Mrs Freud’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... revealed to be ‘mere machines’. Many others have claimed that we must drastically revise our self-image now that we have realised that we are just Turing machines made out of protoplasm. Dennett’s claim is that, thanks in part to the development of parallel distributed processing, a way of programming computers which ‘blazes the first remotely ...”

“... render belated homage, and I will never forgive myself for this failure.’ The tone is not just self-abasing (‘I quail before de Gaulle. He is the Great Other, the inaccessible absolute’ etc), but self-flagellating. What Debray can’t get over is that for most of his life ‘De Gaulle just made us snigger’: he was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”