“... and the disintegration of the unified character with their overview, their version of unity (a self-mocking unity, full of pratfalls but nonetheless reassuring). In this novel humour is not the medium in which everything is suspended, it’s intermittent and not to be relied on, or possibly so black it’s hard to recognise. Jenny Diski’s oeuvre to date ...”

“... rather than eloquent. She never breaks out of the prefabricated language of TV commercials and self-help manuals that has surrounded her all her life. Her dead husband Marvin is, in her words, ‘permanently defunct in the living department’. The effect of removing Marvin from the living department and disposing of his remains in the gardening department ...”

“... from the memorandum whether Kurchatov knew in July 1943 about Fermi’s success in achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction in a uranium graphite pile in Chicago the previous December’ – a much more restrained formulation. But then it was extremely improbable that Soviet espionage, which was already providing Moscow with a great deal of detail, would ...”

“... modern cities, the Manchester of the late Middle Ages, Florence. Her brothers are merchants, ‘self-retired/In hungry pride and gainful cowardice’, ‘ledgermen’ who stay at home. Yet slaves sweated for them ‘In torched mines and noisy factories’ and For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,      And went all naked to the hungry shark; For ...”

“... teachers; and his mother’s family were highly respectable Christian men and women, ‘self-righteous’ non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-gamblers. It is a point of Gates’s memoir that despite national social upheaval in the Sixties, Piedmont coloured did not lose their identities and sense of worth; the boy Skip was made to feel loved at all ...”

“... then been given the special status of literary consultant. While the other teachers taught mime, self-healing, massage, Tai-Chi and wind-surfing in groups, beginning at 7 a.m., Susan saw aspiring writers one at a time in the café on the beach, where she sat in a stately way sipping Greek coffee. She seemed to have thought deeply about writing, how it ...”

“... in 1898, P.B. transformed himself by means of cosmetic surgery, extensive travel and total self-conviction into an advocate and ‘adept’ of Indian mystical thought and a self-styled PhD in Eastern philosophy – part of his studies took place, if that’s the right term, at ‘Astral University’. In his heyday ...”

“... was, with Story consigned to the past tense only in a couple of passages at the end. Story was a self-made and largely self-taught writer. His father was killed on the Western Front in 1918, when Jack was one. His mother was supposed to be descended from a noble family. There are recurring allusions to her in the ...”

“... consider a very important rhetorical figure (or ‘figure of thought’) which we may call the ‘self-excluder’. According to this figure, Sartre or Roland Barthes will heap obloquy on the ‘bourgeoisie’ while leaving quite unanswered the question of what ‘class’ they belong to themselves. The natural inference would be that they are members of the ...”

“... like that? In his travel book, The European Tribe, Phillips records that his sense of identity and self-esteem was woken when Emile Leroi Wilson, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, shouted at him: ‘Hey you, motherfucker. You don’t talk to black people or what? This place fuck up your head already.’ The main theme of Cambridge was that of the black better ...”

“... Do women want equality? To the militant suffragettes campaigning before August 1914, the answer was self-evident. They wanted equality badly, and were ready to do battle for it. The aggressive action which backed their polemical crusade was designed to demonstrate possession of virtues previously considered to be essentially masculine: the capacity for public action and rational argument, physical courage, a ruthless drive for justice ...”

“... Palliser may think that he can write like Jeffrey Archer, for instance, and his portrayal of a self-important politician-turned-bestseller might have a degree of rough comic vigour, but when he makes a cursory attempt at Archer’s style – in which willing nymphets are brought to ‘shuddering organisms’ – the result is neither accurate imitation nor ...”

“... a memoir in fragments, its relative in the past would be Dante’s Vita Nuova, with its rigour of self-examination, and in more recent times, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which does not flinch either at the constant companionship of pain. The author whispers to her friend Jim dying in a hospital bed: ‘You are surrounded by friends who love ...”

“... and politicians, towards the creation of the British National Health Service. But there are also self-inflicted handicaps to ready comprehensibility: the author has done his best to impede communication. His structure means that he tracks through the period 1936-48 several times and with the year not always discernible, for he takes the plans of civil ...”

“... is a strong school of thought that any form of institutional history is no more than corporate self-aggrandisement. Of course, in many cases it is. We have all seen the glossy volumes dreamed up by the public relations (or, as they tend to be known nowadays, ‘corporate affairs’) people. Lots of pictures and a text which hypes the company while failing ...”