“... 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 ...”

“... Jia is a genre novelist, whose books have sold several million copies in China, and an assiduous self-publicist. When Mai Jia’s publisher told the press he would pay an advance of ten million yuan for his new novel, Whisper of the Wind, Mai Jia denied the story, denounced his publisher as a hype artist and so got double the exposure. The TV adaptation of ...”

“... dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing things like that?’ In his memoir – self-published, self-justifying – the chief of medicine, Richard Deichmann, claimed it was necessary to shut down the hospital fast because ‘patients with all kinds of serious infections … in intimate, unsanitary ...”

“... more characteristic trait of Mann’s writing, the reason Nabokov dismissed him as a pretentiously self-monumentalising nonentity. One scarcely thinks of playfulness in connection with Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, and Joseph and His Brothers, whatever comic interludes it may include, tends to sink under the weight of its narrative detail and its ...”

“... and the perspective of TN with which I am directly presented are not the point of view of the true self, for the true self has no point of view … Something essential about me has nothing to do with my perspective and position in the world. ‘Unless you have had this thought yourself,’ Nagel writes, ‘it will probably ...”

“... inner compositions which, like magnets, attract further impressions and serve as the core of the self’s creative articulation.’ This seems exactly right, and very important. What comes out of a successful analysis is the discovery not of a hidden desire but of primordial structures of motivation that organise one’s experience of ...”

“... and not enough granite in her being. The missing granite is provided by Anne Lindell, Violet’s self-portrait in Broderie anglaise, no longer a character cloaked in legend like Sasha, a mirage disappearing into the distance. Far from being a ravishingly beautiful woman, she ‘wasn’t even pretty’. ‘Her features were irregular; her nose turned up, her ...”

“... the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. These lines from ‘Wet Casements’ stage the philosophical problem of other minds, of trying to justify the belief that others have an inner experience like our own. The passage seems to ...”

“... profit and an indifference towards the desires of others behind a carapace of moral elevation and self-congratulation. There is another, less obvious anachronism. Christianity plays a strange role in writings about Roman history. Partly because of the way disciplinary specialisms work within the academy, and partly because of a residual commitment to a kind ...”

“... subjects not citizens. This fixity of citizenship, its exclusivity, formed the hard core of their self-identification. To have two patriae, to be a Roman and also an Athenian, a Gaul or a Samaritan, was only made conceivable by the Romans, who created the only ancient culture that could see noble motives in those that opposed it: Romans ‘make a desolation ...”

“... to anything.’ But for middle-class women even adaptability and talent could not guarantee self-sufficiency. For all the distinction of her writing, Christina Rossetti was never able to secure an adequate income. Her attempts to do so by founding a school with her mother, as Elizabeth Sewell had done with her sister, ended in failure. For most of her ...”