“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... experience’. No serious naturalist could deny it. Nevertheless, beginning in the 20th century, self-styled naturalists have seemed to think that questioning or doubting or denying the existence of experience is part of a thoroughgoing naturalism. How did this happen? It began with the transmogrification of behaviourism early in the 20th ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... writes of Schoenberg at one point, fully aware, I’d imagine, that her own work too has this self-reflexive neatness. Kraus has also said how much she hates ‘hetero-male … Story of Me’ novels in which ‘everything else’ becomes ‘merely a backdrop to the teller’s personal development’. And yet, her own book is driven exactly by ‘the ...”

“... isn’t immediately obvious that the final reference point for Walter’s rationality is his own self-interest and self-regard. As his evasions become intolerable to Skyler, played by Anna Gunn, he insists he’s ready to open up to her. But it turns out his idea of confession is Skyler telling him what she suspects him of ...”

“... which relies on the enthusiasm and voluntary labour of countless thousands of editors, a self-regulating network which pays no one and cannot be bought or sold. It is a better choice than Uber, the rampantly exploitative taxi network Mason has cited elsewhere, but his account of Wikipedia suggests he hasn’t done much editing on there ...”

“... in March 2003, three days after George Bush had gone to war in Iraq, came across as grandiose and self-important. ‘We like non-fiction and we live in fictitious times,’ he bellowed, dragging his fellow documentary nominees on stage with him. Coming from someone whose films have always depended on picking the facts to suit the story, this seemed a bit ...”

“... close friend, though I never really liked him, and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind … He allowed me to tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy … His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time, and I ...”

“... in any general, xenophobic way, it has accelerated the slow resurgence of English national self-awareness. Was that effect intended by the new Tory leadership? It’s hard to know. In the short term, there are Tory votes to be gained in the South by calling for a ban on Scottish MPs voting on English matters. But in the longer term, the prizes the ...”

“... all-powerful and yet in constant danger of collapse; the people who observe it from outside, self-styled experts, see it as either a historically explicable economic system or a timeless mythic structure. Once they enter that structure themselves, however, they find it bears little correspondence to the map of it they have drawn with their ...”

“... witnesses for the prosecution are a prickly masseuse with petty grudges, a former team-mate and self-confessed cheat, who is bitter at being dropped from Armstrong’s team, and Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France. LeMond has recently repeated his accusations in interviews. He finds Armstrong’s comeback incredible and dates his own ...”

“... Gita). Ghosh doesn’t see fiction’s failures as merely a symptom of the dominant culture’s self-destructive individualism but as a significant cause of it. Speculating on the reasons for ‘global warming’s resistance to the arts’, Ghosh looks first to vocabulary: ‘naphtha, bitumen, petroleum, tar … no poet or singer could make these syllables ...”