“... she haunts their empty house. The adult Moore says she doesn’t want to excuse her younger self: ‘I was hungry for love. I know that. But so are many sad hungry children and they don’t rummage people’s living quarters and eat their food.’ Her childhood was unhappy, but she suspects that even if it hadn’t been she still would have eaten too ...”

“... everything and everyone and in the end seems madder than her mother. She slides into excruciating self-exposure, to the point of confessing her sexual frustration to the resolutely silent official. Salvayre repeatedly throws the women’s logorrhea against the man’s taciturnity, playing the bathos for all it’s worth: the mother fulminates, the daughter ...”

“... on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French exaggerated their ...”

“... Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent to the British obsession with the institution Johnson’s Dictionary defined as ...”

“... the mythical women that Ruskin identifies with Rose La Touche). Loyalty can also be a form of self – assertion. In Ruskin’s case it implies an indifference to changing tastes and values that made him repellent to the literary generation that followed him, and often makes him seem an alien presence now. The central reason is the unremittingly religious ...”

“... Phineas G. imposes: ‘I suspect that much of what we stigmatise as irresolution is due to our Self being by no means one and indivisible, and that we do not care to sacrifice the Self of the moment for a different one.’ Psychological incoherence is interesting enough, but why display it on an index card rather than ...”

“... affect; he likes being made to feel ‘glidey’ and ‘nice’; he’s funny about the artists’ self-mythologising and bad behaviour, and irony for him is natural. The presiding angel would appear to be Gertrude Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he ...”

“... of some important painters, notably Degas and Monet, but his comments on art were either self-inflating pronouncements or insults (a Sargent portrait, he said, showed the ‘cleverness of an officer who cuts up oranges into fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to ...”

“... nothing but their own myths of themselves, shambling golems moulded together out of fear, out of self-loathing and arrogance and delusion and lust. And animated by a stamp. His life is approaching a crisis. Various menaces are converging. Jared Sprain, a depressed customer, commits suicide before Mailman can deliver a comforting letter from a ...”

“... a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five months before Highsmith was born, her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; she later told her daughter about ...”

“... them, it has to be said, lived all that easy a life (even if a good few of the difficulties were self-inflicted, no burden feels lighter because of that). Perhaps the obvious explanation as to why these brilliant men were so bored is the simplest one: life, for them, was boring. Life was changing in ways which made it less boring to be an upper-middle-class ...”

“... thanks to Florence Nightingale – the Napoleonic Wars attract a breezier strain of self-congratulation. An emphasis on jolly seafaring tends to block out carnage, disfigurement and mangled limbs. The deaths of Nelson and Moore are remembered, but as moments of high-minded stoicism hardly stained by the spatter of blood. Uglow’s balanced ...”

“... Icelandic arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... Because marriage interrupted her while she was ‘still busy papier-mâchéing her own unfinished self’, her reactions are always framed in terms of what Cal would think: at first she backs the offending design because he would have – as a teenager he left his parents’ country club because it excluded blacks and Jews. But the Times architecture critic ...”