“... to myself, were it not for the grace of God. And I at once found the thought so disgusting, so self-centred, so conceited, that I immediately banished it from my consciousness. Here and elsewhere in Somalia, Richburg the journalist fails in his duty to his subject. He finds the victims disgusting, while enjoying the company of the warlords, to whom he ...”

“... Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ‘Life and Works’ – / In which I aim to take a searching look/At all your poems, books and plays, your quirks’), Francis Spufford’s ...”

“... personalised: literally given a face. Death became ‘a threatening Other, or a morbid anti-self – the one we are each born to meet, an uncanny companion we carry with us through life, a hidden double who will discover himself at the appointed hour’. The second striking characteristic of Early Modern death was its shamefulness. The ‘Dance of ...”

“... Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in ...”

“... intelligent exile, trying to tell the truth, and the portrait he paints of his own younger self is of someone who, like the wartime GIs, was oversexed and over here. You get the same impression in London. Whereas Naipaul, an Oxford graduate with plenty of friends in the bohemian world, is a man who feels detached from the English social scene, Theroux ...”

“... blurb. The translators assure us of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi’s ‘meticulous attention to detail, the self-revealing thoughtfulness of his reflections, and the acuity of his observation’. The photograph on the cover shows him unprepared for this cascade of compliments, sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of ...”

“... very difficult to believe one would wish to trade the blankness of death for living agony. Even self-confessed masochists are clear that the pain they want is the pain of their choosing, at the time of their choosing and with the sadist of their choosing, not an attack of toothache or appendicitis. Yet masochism in some more general form must be implicated ...”

“... can know a real world whose solidity cannot be dissolved even by the most imaginative exercise in self-fashioning. He is not won over by Postmodernist models of social science in which there has been a wholesale abandonment of the objectivist hopes of its classical practitioners. Much of what Simpson says should encourage ...”

“... Nation’ came, but it began to look increasingly threadbare as Ireland boomed with an economic self-confidence which seemed founded on exactly the sort of social consensus thought likely to produce long, accomplished novels. As early as the 1960s O’Connor and O’Faolain had begun to go out of fashion, their demise chronicled in John Montague’s ...”

“... I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her self-effacement. In the early 1980s, Larkin was lauded and Amis was famous; Jennings was reading with some student poets at the Old Fire Station arts centre. She was shy, and that brought out the shyness in me, so I didn’t speak to her. But I knew who she ...”

“... covered in dust and grime,’ he complains at the scene of battle – Ishiguro’s prose tends to self-parody. J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, give much more effective accounts of wartime Shanghai: their sense of place is more vivid, and the ways in which the war dims ‘the brightest lightbulb in the ...”

“... remarked that with Moore it wasn’t so much a case of kiss and tell as tell and not kiss. His self-dramatisations might be traceable to his parents’ taunts that only an old and ugly woman would wish to marry him. Unrequited love led him unchivalrously to boot Pearl Craigie’s backside during a walk in Hyde Park – or at least to fantasise about doing ...”

“... Put that way, and understood as an experiment with the aim of discouraging writerly pretension or self-indulgence, the Pledge doesn’t sound so bad. Indeed, when one gets to the stories themselves, it is not the restrictions of the manifesto that are the problem: any of these pieces could find its way into any number of anthologies and not excite particular ...”

“... rule that the picturesque is based on someone else’s inconvenience. Harar is a walled city, self-contained. Though you are no longer required to leave your spear at the city gates, you are still very much an outsider here. Only two Europeans have made any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard ...”

“... started investigating the matter. Comedians know it as well: hence the increasingly destructive self-importance of, say, Tony Hancock, with his futile efforts to get to grips with Bertrand Russell, both on screen and off. (Hence, too, the bizarre comic erudition of Ken Dodd, who has an enormous collection of theoretical writings about humour, and is fond of ...”