“... 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 ...”

“... up anger. Above all, he read the marches last January as a massive show of anti-egalitarian self-regard, when those who took part or looked on with pride saw them as an affirmation of French values, including freedom of expression. Todd’s mode of delivery, a mixture of abrasiveness and superiority, has added to the offence: Who is Charlie? is laden ...”

“... cultural celebrity by the vogue for working-class sentimentalism in the 1960s and lefter-than-thou self-righteousness in the 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of his death, positive assessments understandably predominated. Some moving tributes appeared as former comrades, colleagues and students tried to take stock, emotionally and personally as well as in ...”

“... indicated by this and similar quotations (including one, I am disconcerted to find, by my younger self), the term expanded at some point to embrace historical accounts of ‘continuing and inevitable’ progress in any desirable direction, rather than simply the direction implied in the original political sense. The clue – a rather gnomic one – to the ...”

“... job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for ...”

“... as he put it, ‘almost for “fun”’, this combination of expressionist political fable and self-pitying fantasy is Hamilton’s most arresting novel. The Slaves of Solitude, its follow-up, was assembled much more painfully. Hamilton finished it by taking to his bed in Henley early in 1946, not long after Bruce had worked out that he was spending £2000 ...”

“... of fractures and abscesses than exposure to accident as a professional hazard. Every Man is in its self-mythologising way the record of a charmed life. The tarantula Herzog once found asleep in one of his shoes and the giant scorpion which spent the night under him in a hammock both declined, for reasons best known to themselves, to put an end to him. A plane ...”

“... to recognise Eileen’s ‘humanising influence’ and characterises her letters as ‘poignant, self-effacing, hopeful and yet full of hurt’. But Funder’s wider aim is to show that ‘wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.’ She ascribes ...”

“... Donald Trump, whose narcissistic exhibitionism offered a never-ending source of unintentional self-satire. ‘Who’s my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really ...”

“... this year, released from the Beast and now a hollowed-out, understaffed shell of its former self, saw its managers fire a group of their own senior journalists in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress an investigation into the magazine’s finances. Newsweek was particularly vulnerable to the flood of free information and images unleashed by the ...”