“... and so must churn out images directed both inwards and outwards with inventive abandon. Marcos’s self-indulgent poetry, the battl re-enactments in Reality, the photo opportunities and Web pages should not be too hastily dismissed; even the EPR, the first of a number of retro Marxist-Leninist armed groups appearing in other states, have tried fielding a few ...”

“... conclude from all this that the Greek literature of the Roman Empire was decadent, fossilised and self-obsessed, a pale and lifeless shadow of the classical model it followed so slavishly. This has been, and remains, the opinion of many, and a general neglect is the result. Today, the greater part of this vast and various corpus remains unclaimed by ...”

“... that it mattered even more to give an appearance of industry and humility. He cultivated humorous, self-deprecating understatement: it was said that he was not asked to write the Declaration of Independence for fear that he would put jokes into it. Disputatious in his youth, Franklin learned from experience to avoid never, always and inevitably and to favour ...”

“... which is all beginning all beginning still yet if I wanted to put a date when this naked shivering self began to puzzle at print sound spokensound the wind in the reeds or a cry in the street I’d choose that room for a start the bangles the curtain rings – it’s my baby tuckoo tuckoo tuckoo it is not the tundish this is echt British except that’s always ...”

“... our war’) could stand in the way of his plans. Campton’s fretfulness marks him as part of the self-indulgent expatriate community from which he imagines his art has set him apart: ‘These other men were whining at the interruption of their vile pleasures or their viler money-making; he, poor devil, was trembling for the chance to lay the foundation of a ...”

“... rarely found elsewhere. Unrequited resentment is the source of this propensity, not romantic self-indulgence or nostalgia standing in for nationhood. Since Walter Scott’s time the wound has been bandaged up in kitsch, of course. But the dressings have become so famously elaborate only because the cut went so deep. Will it ever be healed? Perhaps, but ...”

“... Sarah does not find fulfilment with either of her new loves. What she does find is knowledge, self-knowledge first and then knowledge of others. She perceives that the small theatrical company she had worked with for years in a close and productive professional relationship had been a family for her, a product of the kind of healing substitution that ...”

“... leave it for others to enjoy. But even nationalist destruction took second place to mercantile self-interest. Roofs were dismantled, window-frames stripped from walls and plumbing torn out of floors and carted away. Some looted for profit; others hoped they could refabricate homes elsewhere, in the shells of buildings destroyed after their Muslim owners ...”

“... 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 ...”