“... 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 ...”

“... this latest bulletin have to say? For Paul Johnson, intellectuals are conspicuously ruthless and self-interested males. They are secular: he makes use of the term ‘secular intellectual’ as if there were other varieties, but none is exhibited. They are violent and drunken. They are ungrateful to the ‘kind’ persons who assist them, and who are ...”

“... he can stay off the streets, steer clear of heroin and crack, and keep his nose clean: intelligent self-defence is as much the impulse in this account as hungry aggression. The mottos on the gym wall back him up: ‘Do Sports not Drugs,’ ‘It is Better to Build Men than to Mend Boys.’ For most young fighters who want to turn professional, the prospect of ...”

“... to be ashamed of – though ‘taking the Fifth’ (as invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination was called at the time) was never a very impressive public posture. But what they plainly felt entitled to in their old age was their privacy – and to see their son, of all people, invading it can hardly have made their distress any easier to ...”

“... desultorily in a sea of Elizabeth. She was a copious, enthusiastic, fluent correspondent; he a self-conscious and anxious one. She enjoyed receiving letters as much as writing them, even when she was being used as a nominal addressee of travel letters intended for publication: ‘I accept with open hands – arms your correspondence,’ she wrote to Mary ...”

“... close of the 15th century. It is the Marrano configuration of spirit and language, of conduct and self-consciousness, with its literally numberless nuances of dissimulation, of doubt, of anguished scepticism and remorse, which, according to Yovel, is the source and informing dominant in the entirety of Spinoza’s life and labours. This is not a novel ...”

“... but it is clear that in writing these chapters, she made a conscious attempt to avoid both self-pity and recrimination. Occasionally, the lengths to which she goes to be positive and even-handed are startling. ‘Slavery had its dark side as well as its bright side,’ for example, is a rather incongruous remark. She describes her own master, who sent ...”

“... sense of the authorial presence racing to snare memory beyond memory – without a hint of the self-promoting strategist faking the odds to ensure a final apotheosis. The plot will be familiar to readers of ghosted East End gangster memoirs: bother with the law, church, boxing club, billet in the White Tower, Colchester, battalion champion, guardhouse, on ...”

“... delicate skill, steering Stevens through his solemnities, orotundities, deceptions and self-deceptions, treading with frozen dignity through the corridors of power. The earlier novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were wholly or almost wholly set in Japan. This is the first Ishiguro novel to be set wholly in ...”

“... of money and heroism. Whatever Lochiel thought he was up to, he was not pursuing his rational self-interest within the law in the approved fashion of The Wealth of Nations. And whatever Smith thought he was up to writing that sentence, he must have seen, in the crass juxtaposition of two exact quantities, how useless money (even sterling money) is to ...”

“... their social origins from within even the bottom half of 17th-ccntury society and most were so self-consciously unconventional as to defy generalisations based on their behaviour. This work became part of a larger project in which Hill sought to represent the dispossessed throughout history. He identified himself with such ‘radicals’, once instructing ...”