“... and curves and flat, bright colours; the subversion of women as mothers or sex objects; Warholian self-promotion and self-mythologising; the refusal of perspective (in both senses). And also a quality that runs through all her work which you might call childlike ...”

“... of Goodbye to Berlin with which he introduces himself means he’ll end up depicting his earlier self as a frivolous Weimar cosmopolite. It doesn’t quite work out that way. What’s more, the high-concept fun that The Golden House has with all these conceits isn’t, in practice, much fun, though not from a lack of incident. Petya and Apu quarrel over the ...”

“... going.Here’s my position:failing to gratify you would be folly on my part.This [gestures to self]or anything else you need – my wealth, my friends –it’s yours. I have one goal: for meto be the best Alkibiades I can be.You could help. Better than anyone else.I’d be ashamed not to give a man like youwhatever he wants.’At this Sokrates, in his ...”

“... But strength and size are less significant than intent. Everyone can learn self-defence; and perhaps everyone should. But if someone is determined to rob you or grab you on the street, there may not be much that you, the average person going to the shops or walking home from a friend’s, drunk or distracted or tired from your week, can ...”

“... know what the internet was. She had never sent or received an email. Her phone, devious and self-involved, was an instrument of torture to her: making promises it couldn’t keep; showing caring messages covered in love hearts that instantly disappeared, never to be found again; lighting up, at all times of day and night, with graphics and noises only ...”

“... Germany had washed itself clean without: look, no fascism here. (This rather facile and painless self-absolving is one reason behind the rise of the AfD in eastern parts of Germany now.) Both of Elisabeth’s engineer brothers are tempted, but differently. The older one, Konrad, is ‘elbow-man brother’, with his ‘hasty, busy handwriting’, a ...”

“... is not at all in Davie’s line, and that, in the Cowper poem, the word was not a programme but a self-accusation. He leaves such superficialities far behind him: he has matter to convey. His face is indeed set against letting the morbid fancy roam, but he does not shrink from horror; he insists only that it should be squarely faced and soberly spoken of, and ...”

“... We in the late 20th century make a fetish of leisure and pleasure: yet for most of us status, self-regard, identity and personal relationships are inextricably bound up with access to paid employment. The youthful rentiers of the Drones Club have not died out, but somnolent afternoons in billiard rooms have given way to frenetic action in the City; the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... apparently strikes more deeply than the surface nostalgia of the Sixties; it accords with a female self-respect founded on notions of integrity which need have nothing to do with traditional domestic life. The fully-fashioned skirts, the richly shirred ruffles, the truly beautiful small prints and the pure cotton cloth connote the lack of compromise about ...”

“... be too severe to say that most thrillers aren’t worth reading because it’s in their nature to self-destruct, imploding with their terminal expositions of motive, means and opportunity. It’s true that, once the problem has been worked out, there’s not often much point in going back over it – as Edmund Wilson almost said, who cares who killed Roger ...”

“... and linguistic refinements available to the Cambridge male graduate. The interpolated, arty, self-pitying prose of Roger is there partly because it provides an illuminating contrast with Anna’s, whose favourite reading (The Thorn Birds, The Far Pavilions) may be held to have debased her sensibility but has no effect whatever on her sensible way of ...”

“... Little Me – a fictional autobiography published by Patrick Dennis 30 years ago in mockery of the self-adulatory memoirs which gushed, as they still gush, from actor-dramatists and other multi-talented luvvies? Little Me would not only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect ...”

“... the reader’s, and a childish pact is joined (as in the best romances). Tartt’s writing has the self-delighted explicitness and wonderment that we know so well from children’s fiction, or from adult versions like Swift and Dickens. This is not to be despised, for this wonderment returns fiction to its first principles, its primal scene. But it is ...”

“... the state, though always within the popular sovereignty of the nation. The People were one. It was self-evident to him that social categories, provinces, linguistic groups and particularisms of any kind had to be either unhealthy artifices or anachronistic survivals: nothing could stand between the French citizen and the French state, least of all the ...”