“... all the Slow way. Perhaps Slow Food’s most radical achievement is to have wrested the appeal to self-gratification out of the clutches of the right, to have staked a claim for the left on the sensuous high ...”

“... pages of the London Review of Books’. The piece might cause you to consider whether it’s self-indulgent and irresponsible to draw attention to the shortcomings of a government, or merely the duty of a free press. It might encourage you to think for a moment about whether or not it would be a good thing if the government weren’t ever criticised from ...”

“... by a few stern words from Andy McNab (‘Gulf War hero and ex-SAS man’); a severe and self-congratulatory leader reminded readers that ‘this is the third time the Sun has planted a “bomb” at the heart of a supposedly ultra-secure zone.’ If The Investigator ‘had been a terrorist, the third in line to the throne could have been dead by ...”

“... your stomach . . . by having a "rear” daily’. A remarkably frank passage on the perils of self-abuse – ‘you all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private parts’ – was left out of the original edition on the insistence of the publisher, much to the disappointment of Baden-Powell’s mother, whom he had consulted on ...”

“... With whom am I speaking, are you one or many, what are u, are u, do I make my-self clear, is this which we called speech what u use, are u a living form such as theform I inhabit now letting it speak me. My window tonight casts light onto the snow,I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch, tossed out to capture this shine wecast ...”

“... bedroom nine foot squareyour lust your tears your choice of good and evilyour Biro and your refill.Self-Pity with Everything Grease is undignified,Vinegar’s sordid;On the back of the newspaperSomeone is murdered.She was a dry-cleaner,He was a builder;He must have noticed herJust to have killed her.Yes, to get rid of you,Someone must bother –Someone must ...”

“... the one case in a million where judicial wrongdoing might go unredressed. This is not quite as self-interested as it sounds. The threat of litigation which hangs over every American operating theatre and consulting room, and increasingly over every British one too, has a palpable effect on the way medicine is practised. Undoubtedly the fear of litigation ...”

“... as the chief goal of contemporary art; both are emanations of a love of the self, ‘the sacred cow of today’s culture’. (The briefest hop takes the reader from here to Culture of Complaint, though in this book, characteristically, both narcissism and post-structuralist anti-narcissism, defined as the belief that ‘the subject ...”

“... and cannot resist the irritating familiarity of ‘Sam’. Knowlson’s style is on the whole self-effacing, soberly and relentlessly factual and, in the information stakes, altogether more substantial, given the sources at his disposal. There is much that is new here: for example, on the subject of Beckett’s psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion at the ...”

“... for example, celebrities of the Left. You might want to argue that for this kind of celebrity any self-aggrandisement is offset by the collective good aimed at by their necessarily public commitment. There is a famous psychoanalytic article by Harold Searles called ‘The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy’, in which he lovingly details all the ways ...”

“... she has escaped worried objections or been guiltless of deliberately provoking them. There is a self-mortifying element in Humphries’s theatre which is all the more striking because the selves are multiple, and which goes all the way back to the beginning of his career. But so does his extraordinary sense of language, best studied in the monologues of ...”

“... with ‘lukewarm’ poetry was not a consideration. In ‘The King’ (1894), Kipling shows him self fully aware of his aesthetic position which is completely counter to Arnold, who felt Victorian England to be intractably unpoetic – a supposition indubitably correct in his own case, as a glance at ‘East London’ and ‘West London’ will ...”

“... to work. Though he defended the genre in essays, his sometime resentment shows up in his many self-hating low-status protagonists: unappreciated and underemployed repairmen, a designer of Barbie-doll props, a man who ‘retreads’ used tyres to be sold as new. SF fans honoured Dick early, giving their highest award, the Hugo, to The Man in the High ...”

“... in 1992, when connections were slow, internet users pseudonymous, and the rooms where they chatted self-regulating and unmonitored. It was a zone of freedom and forgiveness where identities could be picked up and discarded without consequence. Say something silly or stupid and you could simply change your handle and join the other chatroom denizens in mocking ...”