“... 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 ...”

“... cynic. Future historians are, I suspect, more likely to depict him as sanctimonious and self-deceiving than as self-consciously amoral and ruthlessly cunning. But just suppose that a latter-day Machiavelli had been asked to devise a ten-point programme for a leader of the British Labour Party at the end of the ...”

“... poetry of a child, volcanic, and unreasoning.’ These remarks pick up on Thomas’s own line in self-representation, a fascination with premature experience which was manifest not just in his life and letters but in his poems too. ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green’: no modern ...”

“... its skyline mangled by ‘the erection of tall buildings, especially if they are of eccentric or self-promoting “iconic” design’, its scattered structure filled in through ‘central government’s quite gratuitous policy of “densification”’, ease of living made all but impossible for anyone other than the very wealthy, with a property bubble ...”

“... her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym … What does she want? … some form of self realisation … to attain herself. She does not know how … so romantic imagination says Paris and the beau monde. As if that would stay her unsatisfaction. Clym has found out the vanity of Paris and the beau monde. What then does he want? … his ...”

“... this at face value (he sometimes resorted to this reductive idiom to ward off any suspicion of self-importance; he was in fact delighted that Faber’s new firm was willing to publish, in effect, an interim ‘collected’), the need he felt to make a fresh start poetically seems genuine enough. But it didn’t come easily: in fact, in the years covered ...”

“... she meant what she said and no more. Readers of her memoirs may see her as an irritating and self-regarding woman, but they will also remember her frankness about her early sexual experiences; she was not a fool, and not someone who lacked self-awareness. It’s questionable, anyway, if her personal feelings mattered ...”