“... things – was so generalised for children of that period as to be unremarkable. The dream of a self-sufficient, ‘de-anglicised’ Irish culture was still alive for many who had grown up around the advent of independence, and, if anything, had only been made more vivid in the years after the Second World War by the attendant notion that an authentic ...”

“... or Debussy. In the later works, however technically accomplished they are, he seems increasingly self-conscious in the sense of the epithet that connotes contrivance. One is often moved to be sure; but there is also a sense of being complicit in something not entirely nice. The puzzle about Puccini is why this should be so. Here, perhaps, is a ...”

“... in the New Statesman praised him for turning ‘his appalled gaze inwards’ – but his self-absorption has some unfortunate consequences.There’s an all too famous passage in the book in which Morrison describes in unashamedly erotic terms undressing his daughter. He goes on to say: ‘a child in my lap, being read to, and I find myself ...”

“... out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.’ The chapter ends with sad reflections on what lay ahead for those present. Hugh Fraser ‘died of a broken heart’ when Lady Antonia left him for Harold Pinter. Pat died of cancer. Jebb ‘committed suicide with a ...”

“... that Chatterton raises in his attack on Walpole, and concentrates instead on pride and poetic self-deification. As an exemplar of the egotistical sublime, Wordsworth’s Chatterton makes Rowley the idol of his pride, the projection of what Hobbes called ‘gloriation of mind’. But even this elevates more than it deserves a literary daring that sprang ...”

“... can generate is itself. The gloom never quite lifts. ‘The desire to exploit the possibilities of self-transformation may burn bright in the cosmetic and surgical industries,’ Warner acknowledges towards the end of this demanding, immensely rewarding book, ‘but stories disclose a growing unease with the menace of different selves taking over the real ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or reveals itself as, convention. It measures the distance between the dreams of a younger self and the betrayals of adulthood, with its new dreams – some vibrant, some pallid. The black comedy of The Group comes from the characters’ lack of self-awareness, their bad judgment, their blind hypocrisy. Honest ...”

“... Michaels documents in her fascinating book, is that the Lamaze craze, so redolent of American self-determinism, originated in mind-control techniques developed in the Soviet Union. Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex earned him a Nobel Prize in 1904. In the following decades, Soviet doctors used the idea to train women to relax during ...”

“... with cerebral palsy, also deceased, and he takes Jude to the doctor after one of his episodes of self-harm. The group’s rich kid is Malcolm, the biracial son of an African-American banker and his white writer wife. He has a bottom-feeder job at a fancy architecture firm, is anxious about being insufficiently black, unsure of his sexuality and creatively ...”

“... hard(er) and follow our dreams, be ourselves and never give up; thus Disraeli became a model of self-empowerment. Daisy Hay makes it clear that Disraeli’s wife, Mary Anne, was in some ways even more of an interloper than Disraeli, whose family wealth and connections (his father, Isaac, was a successful littérateur) are often underplayed. Of ...”

“... had just been passed over for two extremely rare professorships in his field.’ His own titanic self-confidence notwithstanding, who was going to back a scientist whose most creative years were probably behind him? Certainly not the bean counters who underwrote the risks of expensive laboratory research in imperial St Petersburg. Pavlov had made the best of ...”