“... school experience a nightmare. He’d left school at thirteen and embarked on a life of unofficial self-employment, beginning with a surprisingly popular line in repairing sash window cords door-to-door; later, he ran a garage out of a London squat. My brother, fourteen years older than me, also found himself out of the school system early, ultimately leaving ...”

“... and general air of collapse, it is hard not to see in these ‘portraits’ a devasting image of self, something dragged out from within, like entrails. Bourgeois often wore her insides on the outside. ‘For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture,’ she said, a point she reiterated in 1975 when she posed with the latex mould of Avenza on the ...”

“... an article about elephant insemination. Was that a deliberate decision to show the solipsism and self-absorption of Harvard undergraduates?A year and a half later, in September 2018, I had a similar encounter at the Mantua book festival. The political mood, and my role in it, felt strangely familiar. Matteo Salvini, a far-right nativist Eurosceptic widely ...”

“... is a bull shot, like the cocktail at the bar in Langan’s Brasserie. It consists of Langan’s self-portrait, written in the sleepless marches, to which the art critic Brian Sewell has contributed a memoir of friendship which will come as a pleasant surprise to readers more accustomed to his inspired Sowerberry in the columns of the Evening Standard. Last ...”

“... the necessary ruthlessness, The soaring meanness that pinpoints success. We loved that lack of self-love, and your smile, Rueful, at your own silliness.                             Meanwhile, Your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained, Did all your breathing now. Nothing remained But death by drowning on an inland sea Of ...”

“... thus becomes the centre of analysis. Headhunting is the youth’s supreme act of autonomy and self-realisation and also corresponds to the hopes of his elders that their group can reproduce themselves by seizing on this triumphant vigour ‘in the face of inevitable facts of aging and decline’. This is a finely strung account, and its notes sound ...”

“... Fiction hadn’t happened: written as if for publication in the Strand Magazine for 1899? The self-consciousness of the style shows that it is artifice, not artlessness: ‘If it had not been for the shooting and the firing, the speeding and the general traffic violations I doubt if we would have got to Trafalgar Square.’ That was the ...”

“... first run Small boys swarmed when they came to the word Arrestingly etched in the footpath. It was self-protected by its perfect calligraphy – The scrupulous sweep of a hand that had spent its lifetime Writing Eternity. He was born in a Balmain slum and raised underneath it, Sleeping on hessian bags with his brothers and sisters To keep beyond fist’s reach ...”

“... the painting nod to humanist ideas (the skull, for instance, might symbolise Erasmus’ concept of self-knowledge). The painting was a gift to a Roman Catholic, though, and may be, as the catalogue suggests, ‘a painted argument in their intellectual exchange of ideas’. The volume of Dürer’s journals that describes his trip to Antwerp in 1520 is the ...”

“... took place, the legal justification for the kill order – that it was an act of national self-defence against an imminent threat, as described in Article 51 of the UN Charter – looked shaky, to say the least, and will be challenged. Aerial drones have somehow come to stand for the scary future of war. They hover invisibly overhead, and can fire ...”

“... homogeneity to appeal to the mass market, they are moving ‘ever closer to the reality of a self-sustaining city’ where, like the Edwardians, nobody need know they are at ...”

“... done. You’re really fucking important.’ The things that make Lowe and McArthur most angry are self-important rich people, and not having enough money themselves. Or to put it more generously, what makes them most angry is social inequality. They define ‘the property ladder’ as ‘a marvellous system that separates society into . . . the smug and the ...”

“... and it wasn’t as if I took the kind of role in a match that would be affected by a bout of self-consciousness: I was a toe-punting left-back, a stopper who felt peculiar straying beyond the halfway line. I scored only once (not counting own goals, of which there were several), for Nailsea Athletic against Backwell Athletic, on Backwell’s ridiculously ...”

“... review of his second novel, The Thought Gang, had in mind when it said that ‘Fischer pisses on Self and Amis.’ The piece in the Telegraph adds another dimension to this phrase, which features as one of the puffs on the back of Fischer’s new novel, Journey to the End of the Room, published on the same day as Yellow Dog. And in terms of media ...”

“... came out. Litt, who has possibly the most suspiciously clever name for a novelist since Will Self, has been acclaimed by the Guardian as ‘one of the foremost young lions of British hip-lit’. An unsportingly anonymous Londoner, by contrast, sticking their neck out on amazon.co.uk, described Corpsing as ‘a waste of a perfectly good ...”