“... thousands of brave citizens who opposed or defied them. They appear to shrink from looking some self-evident truths in the face. One such truth is that the horrors of the Dirty War were no secret either to the Callaghan or Thatcher governments, or to many others in the allied world; and that if the allied powers had rallied behind the Carter ...”

“... riff about being cheered for breaking wind in the street (after hours of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought came in my mind. Supposing that they knew this old man walking along Long Acre and farting was Stephen Spender – what would they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not have been amused. This is not the utterance of the goose or juggins ...”

“... ambition with love, even though the love he describes sometimes seems exorbitant in its ambition. Self-hatred is always the temptation – for Spufford especially – and other people are there to help us ward it off. ‘The only comfort that can do anything – and probably the most it can do is help you to endure, or if you cannot endure, to fail and fold ...”

“... suddenly soars with great style, wielding his pen like the sword of truth over the heads of these self-satisfied popinjays. ‘Glasgow,’ he writes, ‘for this East Coast writer, could be summed up in the phrase “coarse and vulgar” – a snooty Edinburgh perception of the place which has not entirely vanished today.’ Many writers were drawn to point ...”

“... full of my conflicting emotions towards my homeland. Nostalgia, longing, but also fear and self-loathing and darkness – all those things are contained in this tiny piece. I did not realise this when I painted it many years ago. When one is young’ – he raised his eyebrow and turned to look at Margaret – ‘one does not see such things. But ...”

“... seasons. Henry VIII, whose faithful servant More professed to be and for the most part was, was a self-willed tyrant whose last resort against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as head of the church in England. In this he had the counsel of the ruthless and crafty Thomas ...”

“... interested in what it means to be told your sexuality is disgusting: what it does to your sense of self, and how it contaminates desire. His writing is unusual in combining Hollinghurst’s frankness with an agonised sensitivity to how that frankness can be perceived.In What Belongs to You (2016), Greenwell’s first novel, the narrator recalls how the ...”

“... me better. You always doubted me, doubted my love, the deep emotion that made me give my whole self to you, only to you.’ In 1927, with money in mind, she began a memoir of their life together. It consisted largely of patchy diary entries (she would write these for a day or two then lapse: ‘It’s the same when I make up my mind to keep a record of our ...”

“... I associate with poets like Wordsworth and Arnold. The “great poetry” I like best has this self-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to consider itself.’ Harwood has spent his life going from job to job: forester, librarian, bus ...”

“... Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his leadership. He has had opportunities unavailable to any other Labour leader, and he has thrown nearly all of them away. The greatest ...”

“... skin-crawlingly around: the past, it declared, was harder to escape than we thought. Next was the self-consciously musical Jazz (1992), then the extravagant, overwrought Paradise (1998), which I hoped was a glitch. Love includes something of all Morrison’s big themes: the position of black people in US society; the damage men do to women; the sustaining ...”

“... 12-step path to recovery. Hannah is nobody’s saviour, least of all her own. And yet her lack of self-righteousness, together with her wit, is her saving grace: she knows she is no better than she is, and doesn’t try to hide it – at least, not from the reader, or from Robert. She is, in this and every other way, the opposite of her ...”

“... the transition from middle-class suburban Sandycove son to college man about town with enviable if self-conscious ease, helped along by his until now largely theoretical knowledge of Dublin’s haunts and late-night hang-outs: the Rí-Rá, the Break for the Border, O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street. He sinks pints of Guinness with classmates from all corners of ...”

“... with its own products. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sets out in such a drivingly self-sufficient way, eventually communicates, through the uniformity of its motifs and style, the narrowness of self – sufficiency – its solitude. Garcia Marquez has said that he was thinking about One Hundred Years of ...”

“... neglect Scottish affairs – showed that in the extreme circumstances of prolonged depression the self-help concepts of thrift, industry and self-supporting labour were annulled by the inadequacy of welfare. Professor Smout sums up: ‘what availed respectability if you ended up sleeping on a pile of straw and queuing for a ...”