“... It appeared to many of us borderline holy that Johnson could write with such lack of swagger and self-pity about a guy making an absolute ruin of his life. The same was sometimes said of Carver, but Johnson made Carver seem lugubrious. Then came Drown, which to a certain degree emulated Carver’s pared-down prose but took greater risks with form and ...”

“... have a mind of his own, and a more creative and productive mind than Jonas’s phlegmatic waking self. The night work of the title is what Jonas watches on subsequent tapes, with ever-increasing horror: the figure on the screen laughs, screams like an animal, wields a knife dangerously close to his throat and trots off to the bathroom to pull an infected ...”

“... about childhood sexuality as abuse. Pomeroy described Mr X as ‘63 years old, quiet, soft-spoken, self-effacing – a rather unobtrusive fellow’. He lost his virginity to his grandmother, had his first homosexual experience with his father (of 33 family members he’d slept with 17), and seduced 600 pre-adolescent males and 200 pre-adolescent ...”

“... of any retailer before or since. So the rise of the supermarket happened thanks to the car; to self-service, which dates from the opening of the first self-service store, Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916; to economies of scale; and to the ruthless and effective use of information technology. If the signature ...”

“... into writing a much longer piece on his father and the writing life. The memoir becomes an act of self-analysis as much as a reassessment of his father: For me, this has become a quest, for my place in father’s history and fantasy, and for the reasons my father lived the semi-broken life he did. I’m looking for the way in which a particular adult life is ...”

“... own name, 75 were romans policiers and the other 117 what he called ‘romans durs’ or, in more self-conscious literary fashion, ‘romans-romans’, a proportion more or less respected by the Pléiade selection – an editorial decision presumably motivated not merely by considerations of ‘balance’ but also by the wish to justify Simenon’s claim to ...”

“... He had to conquer, and succeeded completely in doing so, his early tendency to shyness, self-consciousness and laziness. He was proud of his voice, perhaps occasionally too much in love with it, especially in Shakespeare. He knew a lot about Shakespeare and one understands why Richard Sterne, who was in the Hamlet Gielgud directed for Richard ...”

“... and dispassionate in its logic. It was wrong that the Palestinians were not being prepared for self-government. It was wrong that Palestine had not been granted a seat in the United Nations and wrong, too, that it had been debarred from joining the Arab League. The Arab population was already suffering economically and socially from the effects of Jewish ...”

“... have been open to him to question the reliability of Hindley’s statements in mitigation as being self-serving and unreliable,’ but, according to their Lordships, he had not done so.) The final argument put forward by Hindley’s lawyers was that the whole life tariff was disproportionate: given her age at the time of the murders, Brady’s undoubted ...”

“... 1933-45 that came earlier and was more intense than anything we find in Japan, or in Austria, self-styled ‘first victim’ of National Socialism. Earlier – but still delayed. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published a famous book, The Inability to Mourn, on the collective German repression of painful memories after 1945. Norbert Frei ...”

“... years earlier. Whenever the date appears in his narrative, which is often, Paul becomes trapped in self-pity about the unfair burden it has placed on him. Politically charged birthdays run through Grass’s fiction: Walter Matern in Dog Years, for example, shares his date of birth with Hitler. In fact, Im Krebsgang continues the history told in the ‘Love ...”

“... and ‘The Hunters’ (published together with ‘A Simple Tale’) verge on the baroque. Their self-revising clauses, their self-conscious search for the right word, would be excessive were they not so well suited to their protagonists: graduate students reflecting on their childhoods and literature professors slowly ...”

“... Manners is in many ways a very different character from William Beckwith: older, fatter, less self-assured, from a less exalted social class, he’s also a terrible swimmer. Yet they have in common not only a large libido, a finely tuned aesthetic sense and an enviable way with words, but a certain emotional distance from other people, a not uncruel ...”

“... His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of ‘character armour’ and ‘self-regulation’. Reich, in turn, saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son to Summerhill for a while. He once threatened to give up his research and come and teach at the school, but Neill laughed and declined his ...”

“... to Nero, in which the emperor’s absolute power of life and death is supposed to encourage self-restraint. (One assumes Seneca eventually realised just how badly he had miscalculated.) In dramatic terms, the play sides with Nero’s view of the Augustan principate rather than Seneca’s: Nero’s description of the butchery carried out by Octavian and ...”