“... what spirit, Edward Wortley recognised himself in the ironic portrait of Waitfort. The widow’s self-portrait, it should be said, is hardly more flattering. While the piece does speak up for women, it is more interested in talking back to Addison. Even before Pope’s attacks on her in the Dunciad and elsewhere made ‘confutation ... a leading imperative ...”

“... to be arrested.’ He fiercely castigates the Labour government of the 1970s for adopting ‘the self-interested politics of the marketplace’. His final disillusion runs deep, and is in marked contrast to the whole tone of the book, which is written in a racy style much like that of the Sunday Supplement memoirs of Barbara Castle, who gave him his job at ...”

“... For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which stresses backgrounds rather than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of ...”

“... Eastern Europe. Straight felt that he had sold his soul to the Devil and must atone by confession, self-abasement. Societies which have been divided for centuries, familiar with the cycles of civil war, repression and patriotic compromise, are a great deal less censorious and absolute about what men and women did in their political youth. It is not strange to ...”

“... doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously ...”

“... indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often praises Orwell’s style, and even observes its progressive refinement. He must have been conscious throughout of a formidable reader over his shoulder: but he evidently did not ask himself how many faults Orwell would have ...”

“... and patient exploration, in which (often against much resistance and spite and lack of faith in self and life) all sorts of healthy and human potentials came to light: potentials which had somehow survived twenty years of severe Tourette’s and ‘Touretty’ life, hidden in the deepest and strongest core of the personality. This deep exploration was ...”

“... clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the screening and dispatches his most obsequious aide in search of a dictionary. The testimony ...”

“... how to pick a dead drop and how not to look like James Bond, Suvorov was posted to Vienna, to that self-contained section of the Soviet Embassy called the Residency, which is headed by a GRU major-general invariably called ‘the Navigator’. He, as we learn from Shevchenko, can occupy quite a humble place in the diplomatic hierarchy, but because he is ...”

“... quote), there is something of envy of real poetry. Is Vansittart himself a frustrated poet, a poet self-miscast as a novelist? The ‘monster’ of this novel is the career diplomat Roger Kirkland, the ‘high sans peur’ without any feelings (even ill feelings), but with many appetites thus made disgusting. His function here is certainly as the focus of ...”

“... All have shat. Oh, and since our brilliance will strike mortals blind, Henceforth our imperial self will give audience only through screens And we shall never be seen.’ The counsellors bowed and trembled for their balls. They ordered to be engraved in stone on Mount Tai: ‘The Sovereign Emperor made decrees and edicts which all his subjects ...”

“... a bra. Seymour Levin the ex-drunkard and Gregor Samsa the bug ingeniously embody acts of colossal self-travesty, affording both authors a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that was plainly the cornerstone of their staid comportment. With Malamud as with many writers, exuberant ...”

“... more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today. He was shamelessly egotistic and his self-importance attracted readers to the theatrical excitements he publicised. In his autobiographical Ego books he was less candid than Hazlitt was, but then he risked imprisonment. James Harding reveals Agate as a reckless hunter after unlawful pleasures. It is ...”

“... unimportant incident reflects one aspect of Mr Whitlam’s character – his not always justified self-assurance – that helped to bring his period in office to such a dramatic end. Dining with this apparently happy man, or indeed reading his memoirs, which are in places hard going, it is not easy for any non-Australian to imagine either the excitement and ...”

“... is resumed, though changed in form by interruption. Zwerdling emphasises the diaspora of the self and of English society that is chillingly written into the book’s gossip: ‘Negation regularly has the last word.’ Ruotolo, in his book’s only surprising move, proceeds from his analysis of Between the Acts to claim Woolf for anarchism, though the ...”