“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. Today’s Irish writers, he claims, have inherited a self-confidence ‘and (through Joyce and Beckett) a sense of belonging within the mainstream of European literature’. This simple fact of literary history might also go some way towards explaining the comparative demoralisation of English novelists: perhaps it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... distinction (which, of course, would be untenable), but an existential one: the difference between self and other. To be in touch with reality is to be able to experience the world outside ourselves as outside ourselves, and this is an experience which novels, among other things, have it in their power to give us. Iris Murdoch’s novels do not notably give us ...”

“... excellence, for the gesture that contrives an exact requirement, and which can be achieved only by self-discipline and practice.’ And it was three months since I’d seen Hoddle and Ardiles. So off I went again, this time to Highbury on New Year’s Day, for Arsenal v. Spurs. Since this is the key grudge-match of the year, I ought to have known better; on ...”

“... much of Jane Austen’s technique through her corrections of the niece’s: this character is not self-consistent, the early history of another should be hinted earlier in the book, Honourables are not introduced as such in the drawing-room, an elegant baronet wouldn’t say ‘Bless my Heart.’ But it was her niece Fanny Knight who showed the highest ...”

“... people. But I’m not certain he ever is put together. The bits and pieces of Fergus and his wily self-justification are an old story in Scotland, and very much enjoyment is to be got out of them in Mr Jenkins’s new version: but he has not made Fergus a convincing modern character. There are worrying hiatuses in his supposed moral development, especially in ...”

“... can be said to have been achieved at a heavy cost not only in human lives but also in national self-esteem. But the Vietnam War, while it overshadowed American politics and diplomacy during those four years, by no means limited the vast field through which Dr Kissinger, as Presidential Assistant for National Security, had to range. There was the continuous ...”

“... had already published his translation of the Journals – and who ‘did perhaps accept a touch of self-identification in concentrating on this peculiar and tormented figure’. He is lightly sketched in the character Pennistone in The Military Philosophers, leaving out ‘immensities’ which include an existentialist distaste for abstract thought and a love ...”

“... even set foot in a sandwich bar, let alone a singles bar, and wouldn’t know what to order’). Self-deprecation is one of the most characteristic types of Jewish humour, at least in its published form, and it should be noted that this is the first general book of etiquette that gives proportional space to the Bris (‘Miss Manners needn’t tell you that ...”