“... writers wrote at all, in such difficult circumstances, vindicates writing. ‘Utterance itself was self-justifying and creative,’ he says of Mandelstam, ‘like nature.’ The dichotomy between art and life remains intact, without rendering art ineffectual. Contemplating East European faith in art, Heaney is able to say what he would not otherwise have been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... world stage, has disintegrated, Scots Toryism been demolished by its English counterpart and the self-consciously Scotch or kailyard school of literature regained the ascendancy. In England, or at least in the metropolis, John Buchan evokes that primordial English resentment that is the reward of all ambitious North Britons. For our family, his life is the ...”

“... again, then. Here we go. The severe outlines of Kennedy’s writing, together with its relentless self-concern, hardly seem calculated to make an immediate appeal. She does not offer the pleasures or complexities of lyrical language, and her sharp, spare sentences can suggest an alienating aggression towards both characters and readers. What might be still ...”

“... story itself becomes a quite different one. All those ‘European histories’ which are really self-congratulatory chronicles of Western Civilisation – with obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abject misery. But Cage’s Ben Sanderson is beyond agony or remorse, if not quite the concomitant self-pity. He wants out of life and not to bore anyone on the way. Weaving down the path to his doom with an unsteady sway of the hips, Cage reveals the charm of his character through his politeness to a prostitute, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), whom he accidentally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have told how, even now, survivors of the Far Eastern war have been paying thousands of pounds to self-publishing firms to bring out their fifty-year-old diaries or memoirs. For decades such accounts – some, supposedly, written at the urging of psychiatrists – have been turning up on publishers’ ‘slush piles’; scores more must have been despairingly ...”

“... much of a look in; it is the texts that he deploys, most elegantly, to illustrate the discourse of self-indulgence. Even then there are questions of typicality. Were the Athenians really obsessed with fish? We think so, because so much of this literature survives only in quotation, and in quotation by the great philologist of food, Athenaios. At his fantasy ...”