“... been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a ...”

“... with the expulsion of the Soviets. The Great Leap Forward, which followed, was a demonstration of self-reliance. The period of the Great Leap is described with authority and a wealth of detail in the middle volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s formidable Origins of the Cultural Revolution. It was a failure which left the country in a state of near-chaos. The ...”

“... effort of the central books of Trilling’s career, The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955) and Beyond Culture (1965): the attempt to create a culture, often to conjure one into being simply by asserting that it exists. He has several strategies to this end, and the major one is to deploy his literary and critical authority. Every ...”

“... of the kind he describes will now be taking place without him. As a foreigner, Plante claims in self-defence, he is unable to grasp the distinctions the English make between public and private life – which sounds convenient but could, I suppose, be true. No one who records everything he sees his friends do and hears them say does so without malice, yet ...”

“... distaste for, the grotesque American art world. Simonds is rebuked for inflicting on us his ‘self-invented and self-aggrandising ordeals’ in the slime, but elsewhere Schnabel is commended for his ‘display of energy and ambition’, his ‘lack of inhibition and decorum’, his ‘boisterous’ swagger. There are no ...”

“... for production of versions of the Prayer Book was 1850, the height of the empire’s vigour and self-confidence, and despite subsequent decline, around a thousand editions still appeared in the 20th century. (I myself was partly responsible for one of them.) Brian Cummings’s version has a certain memorial quality, partly because it answers so many ...”

“... utter hell’, and has ‘Grown far too crotchety to like/A luxury hotel’. There is plenty of self-parody in this picture – a little later in the poem he identifies his worry about where the next drink is coming from as ‘grahamgreeneish’ – but this was a time when Auden was rearranging his sense of himself and of his world. Comedy was one sort of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... upbringing in County Clare from a distance not yet far enough to be fond; she wrote in complicated self-exile from Ireland, which had banned her first six books. Mother Ireland contains some of her finest evocations of childhood outside her first novel, The Country Girls, and the underrated A Pagan Place (1970), and gives us some of the quotes about Ireland ...”

“... effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North ...”

“... embarrassing to begin speaking of her in this way, since Paley is known not as a purveyor of self-help but for writing some of the more ambitious and surprising American short stories of the 20th century. And while she did write about gossip, women’s friendships, long days alone with toddlers and other aspects of experience that were not, in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his worldly occupation: the former was to be manifest in the latter. It was through rigorous self-analysis and constant application to duty that the elect ascertained his election, and since to doubt election was to demonstrate that one belonged to the reprobate, such analysis and application were the necessary seals of salvation. Scottish theology, as ...”

“... Catholic shadow falling over so much of his beliefs. Most ironic of all is when Mr Freeman’s self-emasculation from the historical and the Irish dimensions leads him to scold Edmund Burke for failing to understand the Irish Catholic question. As examples go of scholarly wisdom after the fact, it is a fine entry, comparable to the economic historians who ...”