“... this kind of thinking, would indeed have taken it for granted as the theoretical foundation of his self-esteem. In a utilitarian democracy he would be able to explain his ‘function’ thus, albeit with shyly downcast eyes. And yet he would also by that date have known that the theory was failing to hold up, or was turning into an impossible ideal. The new ...”

“... his longing to reveal himself, in his writing, was made difficult by an equally strong fear of self-revelation. This is not a new concept – something very similar was seen by Winnicott as constituting the basic psychological make-up of all artists – but that doesn’t make it any less plausible. What, then, were the childhood experiences that led to ...”

“... years. And it contained, as it almost always does, a strong grain of sense beneath the deliberate self-parody. He is right that something must be seriously wrong when a senior British journalist can prefer to edit the Mail rather than the Times. (Indeed, he might have added that matters are even worse when his own editor-in-chief, Max Hastings, rejects the ...”

“... outside the charmed circle maintained: that for all his human warmth Fox was an intensely self-centred being. In fact, there are other clues, beginning with his mother’s engaging description of him as a child, entering eagerly and intelligently into any conversation, yet ready to take up a book when his parents were reading, ‘vastly amused’ and ...”

“... somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. The Gothic situation is always a self-circularising time-warp from which, however, the reader has broken free, carrying with him, as it were, the now emancipated girl and the radical humanist lifestyle. Terror is cosily isolated, enjoyed because left behind. Politically speaking, there is an ...”

“... a loss. He was gripped by two warring impulses: emulation and escape. Free to become himself, what self should he become? There was still a chance, he at first seems to have thought, that he might turn out to be a novelist with gifts of his own. He published five novels, and then stopped. It was not that the books were rubbish; indeed Bron is at pains to let ...”

“... that needs to be administered vaginally’ – is lost beneath the weight of the character’s self-pity. In short, the author is everywhere and nowhere in this novel. For ever wriggling inside his characters in order to ventriloquise his own aphorisms, he can never get enough distance from them to grasp the real foolishness or enormity of their ...”

“... to see, unless it is that unlike most novelists she made her books out of a busy, open, outgoing self: not a brooded, secretive, internal one. The fact remains that I would rather read about them and about their background, in such an excellent biography as this one is, than re-enter today the world of her own novels. Jenny Uglow is an erudite ...”

“... of packaging. Perhaps we need the arts more than ever in times of crisis and recession: better self-expression with a pen than a gun. But it’s the greatest competition of them all, Manchester’s bid to host the Olympic Games in the year 2000, which provides the rationale behind the acceleration of public and private spending on the arts and city ...”

“... Dr Sarkhou is a dapper man. With his smart suit and manicured moustache he looks every bit the self-assured consultant, the established performer on the international conference circuit. But as he talks his emollient manner slips, his frustration at the insensitivity of Kuwait’s rulers grows. ‘It’s taken them a year to set up an official psychiatric ...”

“... orientation, and so the absence from the media of a range of homosexual representations encourages self-oppressive silence. But dwarfism is a rather different condition, visible to excess, impossible to disavow (the book contains a closet midget, a full-grown actor who plays a child, but dwarfs don’t have that option). It strikes a false note that Cady ...”

“... it was me living my life’ do net enlighten one much. And her soul-searching can look like self-indulgent meandering. ‘Reaching deep into the opaque blue water of memory, I wanted to find a shape beneath, something of the vast mass underpinning that depression,’ she writes, as a prelude to her recollections of what she herself at one stage ...”

“... voyeur and sadomasochist. The scientist’s life story is one of unbroken commitment and self-transcendence. Born in 1894, Kinsey spent the first ten years of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous ...”

“... the seats at once of lust for gain and taste for luxurious ease which sapped the will to sacrifice self for state, and of the proletarian alienation and socialist militancy that placed the class before the national struggle. They need not have worried. The ability of each of the states concerned to represent its war as one of defence turned the flank of a ...”

“... idiom and coinages (‘diddleypush’, ‘rainbowy’) – are used to make this rhetorically self-conscious prose suggest the voice of a shelf-stacker in an Oban superstore. In the first novel one didn’t argue with this sleight-of-hand, partly because Morvern’s oddnesses were so seductive and her imagery so beautiful, but most of all because the book ...”