“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spying on prostitutes and their clients through a hole in the wall. But although money, power and self-gratification seem the only values that matter in the world around him, he’s nevertheless fascinated by the wholesome ménage in the flat underneath his own, where a widower, Holst, lives with his 16-year-old daughter, Sissy. When Frank lies in wait to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it, the communist leadership had abandoned the Partisan practice he most cherished – relentless self-criticism – and consecrated instead a social hierarchy that could be justified only in wartime. Although he came to see himself as Trotsky’s heir, Djilas wasn’t prepared to form a political faction to demand more democratisation of the state: his ...”

“... are magnified by the protagonists, who at once set about reconstructing events in more or less self-serving ways. Caroline Lamb put the Byrons into Glenarvon, the sort of bad Gothic novel from which they seemed at times to have emerged. Byron satirised Annabella in Don Juan, while she herself told and retold the story over the four and a half decades ...”

“... shift in artistic voice from the active to the passive, from painting as an arena for existential self-expression (the alternative account of Abstract Expressionism put forward by Harold Rosenberg) to painting as a surface where external signs are impressed. Where Rauschenberg played ‘in the gap between … art and life’, a motto that suited his ...”

“... entirely flippant. Size was a more noticeable factor than age in his relationship to his childhood self. Vulnerability, ignorance (which is not the same as innocence) and the necessity of accepting an apparently endless succession of baffling and sometimes alarming developments are the essential experiences of childhood which adults, especially when they ...”