“... 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 ...”

“... in its revealed truths. Theory can be good for historians, and few of us practise the perfectly self-abnegating primary research prescribed by Geoffrey Elton. We need something larger to help us move from the specific to the general, and towards some approximation of meaning. Acton presents his task reasonably, challenging readers to use classical ...”

“... as their murderers could manage to lay their hands on. Thereafter Bassani has the tact and self-confidence to say little more of the fate that awaits his people, though we are later shown the various ways in which the malice and greed of some of the locals, and the fear felt by others, combine bit by bit to isolate the city’s Jews from their former ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less self-consciously lugubrious. A Touch of Love is harder to defend from a strictly avant-garde point of view. Using a broadly naturalistic idiom, it tells the story of a writer brought low by the strain of living up to his own avant-garde aspirations. The main ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... get to hear is semi-professional melancholians beating on tiny little tin drums, squelching, self-pitying, huffing, puffing and generally wallowing in their own bubble-bath solemnity: the sound of the Fabian Society drinking whisky sours in a hot-tub at a nudist colony. Colin McAdam isn’t from round here: he’s Canadian and lives in Australia. Some ...”