“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... algorithm will be all interconnections and no unity, a hyperactive brain void of the purposeful self-consciousness that might alone make it a bearable human habitat. Whatever has for a narrator a 30-year-old software analyst who finds vacuity everywhere that he looks or goes, and his own life to be very nearly as pointless as everyone else’s. Only very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... saw the similarities between humans and other species: the childlike bravado of rabbits, the self-interest of certain cats and the unmistakeable resemblance of a middle-aged woman in a panic to a duck in a bonnet and shawl. Her family, friends and the innumerable pets she kept all her life were the objects of her study and became, eventually, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”