“... curiosities, however, need no explanation. Gold borders dotted with insects, flowers and fruit are self-justifying embellishments; as are the creatures that take part in comic encounters (like the huge snail doing battle with a knight in the Fitzwilliam’s recently acquired 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter), or those that perch in marginal flourishes like ...”

“... journalist’ (‘front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible’): Add to these anecdotes and quotations Neil’s writing style, which is dour and monotonous, that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke or a sign that the greatest young journalist of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more probable, but still pretty unlikely. Wishful thinking is a hallmark of Ukip, and they’re self-importantly noisy enough to make it look as if they matter more than they do. Kilroy-Silk’s bluster about the possibility of Ukip turning into a plausible party of power has been inflated in part by what Nicholas Soames, the Conservative defence ...”

“... might just perhaps ensure that he won’t get lazily shelved down the cultural end, if any, of the self-help bay in the book stores, when what he has written is in no sense a bluffer’s guide, full of practical tips on how to stay afloat at the next bookish conversazione you get sucked into. Rather, he wants us to know that it doesn’t in actual fact matter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre Coustillas, has for decades provided Gissing materials and support to other scholars, but Delany is the first in more than 25 years to produce a full-scale biography, and the first to ...”

“... and napping at his desk when he was tired. His masters might get exasperated with his serene self-absorption, but he continued to bring credit to the house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself ...”

“... as you are. People who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident to you. Who don’t even seem to care that their logic is bad.’ ‘But that’s because they’re free,’ Joey said. ‘Isn’t that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it’s a pain in the ass ...”

“... Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck by the marked self-consciousness of his witty manner, which resembled that of a knight of the theatre). The ones here are far less eloquent. Only a few of them were written before Larkin moved to Belfast in the autumn of 1950, to become a librarian at Queen’s University. His ...”

“... which the control is lost; and in the struggle something deeper emerges, something of the hidden self, the personality and its suffering and uneasy privacy. Lotto lived in Bergamo between around 1513 and 1525. It is possible that part of the pleasure of being there, and in Treviso, was that Titian was elsewhere, that there was no great competitor in the ...”