“... have felt some difficulty in settling down to life as an official. He did not lack enterprise or self-confidence – far from it – but no doubt the former businessman was used to going his own way with less interference. Far different were these helots he had now to work with! ‘Your typical civil servant is a terrifying product, almost, even so early as ...”

“... iceberg than the ship’ – and casually lists the lovely features of her shores as if they were self-evident: ‘On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet.’ She can sneak in as much strangeness as any Martian, making the unearthliness of her creatures more apparent by approaching them with domestic similes: man-of-war birds ‘open their ...”

“... of the Lock (Pope’s), Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t know the average May mornynge temperature of the British Isles ...”

“... up by some bigger magazine. Whereas in Ezra Pound’s day, the established culture-powers were self-protectively resistant to the new, nowadays they seem almost voraciously hospitable. Even magazines like Harpers and Queen and Cosmopolitan are in the market for highbrow innovation, or intellectual attitude-striking, in a way that would have been hard to ...”

“... to become the tools of foreign surveillance?’ There was no doubt a chauvinistic element in this self-image of the free-born Englishman, but the benefit to the political refugees was unquestionable, and their experiences were less contradictory or paradoxical than many of them thought. They enjoyed, or endured, the toleration born of indifference. They had ...”

“... how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with some justice, are a ...”

“... serving officers to discuss their profession in print. These scribbling fellows could be ruthless self-advertisers, like Churchill and Baden-Powell. There was nothing wrong with an officer giving himself a manly pseudonym and writing about pig-sticking in Blackwood’s – or, of course, with a general writing his memoirs on retirement. Today serving officers ...”

“... novel ever is – into the cultural mainstream, largely as a result of Capote’s shrewd gift for self-promotion. Capote’s gifts as a stylist and storyteller are more accessible in his second novel – novella, really – The Grass Harp, and in his early stories. Like his debut, The Grass Harp concerns the childhood of a sensitive Southern male orphan ...”

“... of well-being isn’t so much a first principle as a tautology. He’s posited a single, final, self-evident desideratum and christened it ‘well-being’. No doubt he’s pleased to have avoided the survival trap of evolutionary psychology, but he has had to invent an empty category to do it. He can’t let the category stay empty for long. Neuroimaging ...”

“... simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.’ Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The Marriage Plot, and sought to marry the formal mechanics and self-consciousness of postmodernism with the moral and ...”

“... when she libelled a whole village; and now the third, Aftermath, has brought Cusk charges of self-absorption, narcissism, condescension, commercialism, cruelty towards her children, too much revelation, not enough revelation, naivety, grandiloquence, ice in her heart and a lack of a sense of humour. Cusk has put the vitriol down to people not being able ...”

“... the guest quarters.’ We are clearly in the world of Nothing On here. But we’re also in the self-aware, self-consciously theatrical world of Noises Off. Skios just about observes the classical unities of place (the island of Skios), time (a single 24-hour period) and action: everything that happens has its place in ...”

“... how safe Kim would be at home, her social network, her psychiatric history and history of self-harm. I was increasingly impressed with her friend, whom I began to feel sure I had met before. Of the 1500 or so patients registered with me, I know about a hundred by name. They are the ones I see often or whose illnesses have made a particular ...”

“... ensues, the name is presumably derived from ‘tally-ho!’). It is a witty study of hypocritical self-interest and genuine self-doubt – the young poet dislikes his first encounter with the sea because of the banality of his response to it, and the ‘trashy comparisons’ it provokes – which gradually turns ...”

“... in the Dáil to explain what he regretted most about his time at the wheel: the failure of a self-aggrandising stadium project in Dublin, nicknamed the ‘Bertie Bowl’, which had led his own coalition partners to compare him to Nicolae Ceausescu. With this mea culpa went the news that the man of the people would be drawing a pension of almost ...”