“... Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of 1945, and the historic achievements of postwar reconstruction, were in large measure due ...”

“... It was nearly always men whose well-earned successes the preachers of the Victorian self-help ethic borrowed for their exempla, but they could have cited instances of female authors who not only staved off destitution as portionless spinsters or unprovided-for orphans but through heroic labours paid off the debts of spendthrift, incompetent or ...”

“... comes to terms with one’s past.’ How very American, I thought: the quest for roots; self-measurement against the promise of the past; the reunion as a personal and collective stock-taking. A painful business. Meanwhile, however, Tony was persuading me. As a student of American culture, who had had a particular college experience in the United ...”

“... giving rise to a ramshackle form of capitalism swiftly overtaken by other countries. So much for self-help! From this angle, Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have wrought an economic miracle. On the contrary, he believes the Churchill coalition ought to have developed a coherent industrial ...”

“... about hospitals,’ she said. And why should she not? Pym is wonderfully open-eyed about the self-proclamation of the caring and compassionate lobby, and the way in which, in life as in fiction, its roles get adopted and its fantasies acted out. A natural do-gooder, like most of Pym’s leading characters, the heroine cannot help wondering if there might ...”

“... as if they were people he knew, noting Whitman’s ‘good humour’, Joyce’s ‘tireless self-regard’, Edmund Wilson’s ‘dogged honesty’. In a coy foreword, he pretends to be diffident about his criticism (‘Another book. Another slain forest’), and sets himself up as an amateur, dabbling in criticism to pay his alimony. But for all his ...”

“... would impute any lack of psychic integrity in the man himself. True enough, he was a peculiarly self-contained person whose inner life was always opaque, even to his most intimate companions. But there was no harsh discontinuity or irreconcilable inconsistency in his temperament, and we have no reason to suppose that he was nervously guarding some guilty ...”

“... action: but it will not explain the personal commitment. Given Adam Smith’s insistence that self-love was a more influential mechanism of social betterment than benevolence, and his scepticism about the probity of officials or the likelihood of a man working as hard for the public as he would for himself, the conscientiousness with which he did his work ...”

“... his outlay of compassion, squandering now, though, less care on the universe than on himself. Self-pity became his constant theme. In place of the rather studied, substanceless, arabesque contortions of the early verse, Berryman offered vital human drama – either his own or that of his serviceable alter ego,‘Henry’. The improvement in readability is ...”

“... other people’), whereas Murry’s frankness was often a kind of falsity arising from his deep self-deception. It was the shining earnestness of this self-deception that initially appealed to people. He radiated ‘a kind of religious enthusiasm’, Huxley remarked. ‘At first, people tended to catch fire from this ...”

“... where the whole of this mighty process could be comprehended. Hence world-history was Teutonic self-understanding, and part of its preparation for dominance in the coming Age of Caesarism. Although the author does not quite say so, An Unfinished History of the World is best understood along similar lines: that is, as a British Philosophy of the ...”

“... is understandable but perilous … it is historically evasive and may, in the worst outcome, prove self-defeating.’ Why so? Mulhern is quite clear about this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant culture’. He announces a battle to ...”

“... so that it might grow in its own true way’. Mark Mathabane’s book, by contrast, is not at all self-critical and never escapes from or transcends its adopted styles. This is very much a book for an American audience. At one point he successfully manipulates an Afrikaner by telling ‘the bastard what he wanted to hear’. His book tells Americans what they ...”

“... FitzGerald’s perception of the common Puritan tradition. ‘Rootlessness and the search for self-definition’, she argues, are ‘permanent and characteristic features of American life’, the result of ‘occupational and geographic mobility and the loose weave of the society’. Jerry Falwell, the Rajneeshee, the gay activists of San Francisco and ...”

“... his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a dishonest, self-serving lot. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the almost insane hatred of the average man and woman that is baffling.’ What is it about Epstein and England that explains the rows and tetchy relationships, the ‘insane hatred’ – and, more pertinently the ...”