“... factors. One of Walser’s greatest stories, ‘Kleist in Thun’, is the lightly disguised self-portrait of a conflicted writer wrestling with his demons. ‘It is as if radiant red stupefying waves rise up in his head whenever he sits at his table and tries to write,’ Walser says of Kleist. ‘He curses his craft.’ At some point, the act of ...”

“... smile’ when he asks for one of the better bedrooms at the retreat, and he is mindful of his self-absorption, talking of ‘my unwieldy, despotic ego’ or, in the third person, ‘his fearful, narcissistic little ego’ or, generalising, ‘the knot of obsession, megalomania and the noble desire to do a good job that constitutes a writer’s ego’.His ...”

“... Ulster Unionist Party leader, Doug Beattie, to describe him as a ‘juvenile, pathetic, moronic, self-indulgent, narcissistic fool who jokes … as people die’. Wilson is one of the DUP’s longest serving politicians, close to Eurosceptic Tories in the European Research Group. He urged the British government to take the hardest possible stance during ...”

“... ago,’ one man chortles. Quizzed about their reasons for choosing the Manor, some are remarkably self-revealing, one retired man describing the ‘mad’ world beyond its gates as too stressful for him, while a divorcee admits that she hopes such a self-contained development – with its leisure facilities, café and ...”

“... the 20th century. This is high confessional poetry: vulnerable, proud anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. The book begins with a Tennysonian heart attack, ‘the blown aorta/pelting out blood’. Hill’s ...”

“... or who has read Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), will be familiar with this sort of self-regarding fury. ‘I should like to think,’ Davie ominously begins a sentence in Purity of Diction, ‘that this study might help some practising poet to a poetry of urbane and momentous statement.’ Like most practising poets, Enright did not take ...”

“... life with the supreme excitement of combat readiness, that intensely pleasurable feeling of self-possession that comes from the knowledge that a fight to the death might start at any time, and that one is prepared for it, by mental disposition and acquired skills. The moments of actual combat – uninterrupted hours of combat are a physical ...”

“... Jacobin jailers by paying social calls from cell to cell, composing madrigals, retaining utter self-control and carrying on with light, debonair conversation, even while awaiting the tumbrils that would take them to the guillotine. Is there any reason why we should trust this late 19th-century reactionary – an interesting thinker, but an exceptionally ...”

“... scolding’ except private parodic performances among themselves of their father’s anger and self-pity (‘O God, O God, O God, have pity on me and grant me patience’). McGahern found books in the shambolic farmhouse of the Protestant Moroneys, who, in between picking bees out of their beards, gave him freedom to range in their library. His success at ...”

“... liberation, but stayed on to live under post-colonial majority governments. Their level of self-awareness, she argues, was greater than Memmi’s psychological portrait allowed, for these were people who saw that colonialism had ‘misshapen them too’ and that its privileges were distortions. They welcomed the withdrawal of these privileges in ...”

“... years, if indeed they ever did. To her credit, she is no hagiographer; she is aware of the more self-indulgent and pretentious aspects of Berdyaev’s life and work in particular. (She tells us, incidentally, that Brodsky admired Berdyaev, but the object of his and his generation’s greatest admiration among intellectuals of that period was Lev ...”

“... citizens don’t necessarily see. But this isn’t how Hemon works: America, to Pronek, with its self-help books, baseball and optimism, is all the same and all surface. He can’t see further because America doesn’t make sense to him: he loses his job as a waiter when he mistakes iceberg lettuce for romaine. Like the little boy in ‘Islands’ he can ...”

“... unusual degree autobiographical. The Enigma of Arrival may be the most important of his essays in self-understanding, for it says more than the others about the complexity of his attachments to England. Half a Life has some of the now familiar blend of autobiography and fiction, and offers a different view of the early London years. Closer to fact, though no ...”

“... who painted a negative portrait of Edward after the King’s death ‘in order to retain his own self-regard and not own up to the fact that he was, for all his intellectual brilliance, a moral coward, a vacillator and a compromiser’. Heffer’s loathing obscures the fact that the personal relationship between sovereign and Prime Minister is as important a ...”

“... if he was playing golf or driving a rickshaw’ – and by their perfumed wives in the clubhouse; self-satisfied conversations at the club revolve around Ivy League schools and the choice of Scotch on Concorde. Price is appalled by the smugness of this moneyed crowd and keeps to himself. Timmy Price inherits his father’s indignation, but not his golf ...”