“... enemies – a teddybear, his name – and anyone may be his enemy. He and his chums contemplate self-defence against a teacher who likes to grip their balls while asking them questions – but what’s even the One-Two Punch against someone who’s got you by the balls? His dissertation on conkers says everything about the ruses of seniority in these ...”

“... took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from historicity, location, nature and culture. What interests us about Descartes in this context is the fact that he sought to empower the ...”

“... a ‘panicky bullying of the boat’ – which confronts each crew member with his or her truest self. Sea voyages, of course, are apt and ancient metaphors for life and for the eternal questing of artists, and the most venerable of these is invoked on the second page: An uncertain passage in the Odyssey has Tiresias speaking of a land without ...”

“... to Carlos Serrano in 1961. In that letter he speaks of a ‘constant struggle between the need for self-expression and the desire for self-effacement’. Renoir is everywhere in his films, even in the places we least expect him to be. He is not only the film-maker but also the object of his makings; it is as if there were ...”

“... salvation is contained in Scripture alone; that the message of Scripture is single, coherent and self-validating; and that it had been perverted by churchly forms, traditions and innovations from some date after its delivery in Palestine to the time of Martin Luther and the other 16th-century reformers, who broke the mould and put things right. I am not sure ...”

“... career with zealous rage. Meeting, in his dream, a contemporary who now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ...”

“... Kali, in the other the Old One, eat their prey – the difference being that Taliesin’s previous self Gwion runs away from the Old One, whereas Vikram offers himself up to Kali willingly, hoping to outwit her. The cauldron in which Vikram is cooked to a crisp replicates ‘the fluid darkness’ of the Old One’s womb, and both stories of pain and loss of ...”

“... 1964/70 Labour Government. It is impossible not to wonder whether, had Brown been marginally more self-controlled, he could have persuaded Wilson to devalue in 1965 or 1966. Had he done so, the history of the 1964 Government would almost certainly have been very different. Instead of being a failure by its own self imposed ...”

“... nationalism finally triumphed in the Republic of Ireland, and the state settled down as a dull and self-satisfied monolith. The old Protestant business class, Beckett’s class, would then lose all its power. The writing is self-conscious: it reads as though the writer wrote it merely to read it himself. And indeed he did ...”

“... genius confined him to what Henry James called the madness of art, since that is exclusive, self-inflicted, entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Colet, whom she attempts to reinstate as a female icon and ‘yet ...”

“... Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the narrative. Lockridge was so depressed by the scorn that the prize brought him that he killed himself the same ...”

“... She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty hours a day until he achieved fame and fortune. Like Wilson, Hanson came from Milnsbridge, Huddersfield, but his origins were not quite as humble as his accent might ...”

“... It’s not a disaster, far from it. It’s a lumpy, unequal, slow-moving book, more than a little self-congratulatory, but it refuses, with its returning hero Yossarian, to treat death with the respect that is due to life, and it is often very funny. The first voice we hear is that of Sammy Singer, the (in Catch-22) unnamed ‘small tail gunner’ who kept ...”

“... with a drinking problem. He disappears for days at a time, and when at home he’s a stranger in self-imposed exile on the porch at night, darkly nursing a beer. Their mother, Audrey, is a tiresome, self-satisfied woman, painfully aware of her entrapment in a life of waste and emptiness; her pettiness and appalling ...”

“... instead of coming whining to their parents to have buttons fastened, it would do much for their self-esteem and turn them into self-reliant citizens. This rough-hewn psychological approach led to a brief spurt in profits. Stores were induced to show customers a short film entitled ‘Bye-Bye Buttons’, just as dentists ...”