“... in some of them; we can never really be sure what went on inside Max Gate. Hardy was notoriously self-protective, destroying Emma’s diaries, ghosting his own biography, keeping his heart out of his letters. Seymour-Smith’s insistence on Hardy’s intellectual capabilities, while it overstates the contrary view, is also a step in the right direction. But ...”

“... another by letter. At Christmas, after a debasing night with a senator, Vera, in a drunken act of self-abasement, sends them each a card: ‘I’m no fucking good. Make me an offer.’ The horrified siblings at once join forces to wrest the property away from her. Her brother Tom writes her an officious letter, declaring that the hotel will be sold by auction ...”

“... nor white could easily acknowledge. For people like the Taylers, the retention of any sense of self depended on keeping in place the markers of white middle-class living. One can feel the heat from Maude’s fury, simmering on the page. She was not intended for this. All this was to have been temporary ... The pain of expectation unfulfilled is a major ...”

“... the Square Mile, and its determined protection of its privileges, helped create a climate where self-interested commerce could do virtually what it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte ...”

“... a second language has mattered so greatly to us. When I look a long way back, to disinter my child-self first becoming attached to French at the age of nine or ten, I fancy I find it becoming newly detached at the same time from English, as if first meeting up with a foreign language meant also coming to a more fastidious view of language as such: a great ...”

“... us, and he is being quite serious, ‘great and gifted’. His mighty ego can easily accommodate self-criticism, which is engaging, sometimes even charming. But its chief merit is its utter contempt for civil servants, businessmen, military officers and almost all Clark’s colleagues, especially those who from time to time get in his way. Discretion is not ...”

“... awkwardly with the familiar narrative concerns of The Blue Afternoon; it’s an unnecessary and self-conscious writerly affection. Boyd is primarily a storyteller, and has never been shy of letting us know it. In The New Confessions John James Todd speaks confidentially to the reader: ‘Anyway, I digress. Let me tell you something about this enterprise ...”

“... charabanc as it makes its amiable progress through the better journals. The tone is a pert self-argument, a kind of educated mutter, as if life presented itself to Enright as an exam that needed to be marked – one can hear the tick and scrape of the red pen. In ‘Confetti’, for instance, the poet calls a taxi to take him and his pregnant wife to ...”

“... there was little rejoicing over the demise of the Alliance: instead, the Party engaged in a self-critical assessment of its own part in bringing about a decade of Mrs Thatcher. What makes things even worse for radical, progressive spirits is that the Ultra-Right appears to be even more in control of the Conservative Party this year than it has been ...”

“... Carey would want to dissent from this description. In a preliminary autobiographical section (‘Self’) he gives us the notorious ‘Down with Dons’ (1975), which hammers donnish cults such as that of Maurice Bowra, claims that dons tend to be insolent and bumptious and to have insolent and bumptious children, calls them ‘envious careerists’ devoting ...”

“... which is full democracy. But ancient administrators, even at their height, do not match the self-motivating efficiency of the grand Berlin bureausaurs Weber observed: what moved the ancients, he notes, was the boot, not esprit de corps. Not much could be hoped from the single public slave who presided over the Athenian archives. Down in the ...”

“... that is, the selected facts to support her assertions. Edwina’s part was to use her talent for self-publicity to grind her health education message into the nation’s skull. It had to be kept simple. To avoid cervical cancer, for instance: ‘Don’t smoke and don’t screw around.’ Her book’s tone is jarring and bright; there are faded incursions ...”

“... but it also wishes to promote along the way some image of the ideal Briton: he who combines self-reliance with a sense of public service. Of course, in order to prove that your self-reliance is genuinely tough-fibred and that your sense of public service is not just some youthfully liberal flash in the pan, you have ...”

“... to make the point that the son of the insurance salesman from Newark has done rather well for him self. May was/is ‘a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie. She had been sent off to the best schools by a Cleveland paint-manufacturing family that had achieved enormous financial success, as well as the civic distinction and social ...”

“... first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, would not appear for another six months. And whereas Stafford, who wrote very little fiction during the last twenty ...”