“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shouldn’t own a relic connected with his better-known namesake. This someone was the self-styled Marie Corelli (whose real name was Mary Mackay), bestselling novelist and spiritualist, who was probably one inspiration for E.F. Benson’s Lucia, and was certainly the most conspicuous if not the most talented writer ever to live in ...”

“... the winning charisma of billboard bimbo Angelyne, vertically-challenged child star Gary Coleman, self-proclaimed smut peddler Larry Flynt, and 151 other amusing candidates ($3500 was enough to get your name on the ballot). These included the ultra-right, anti-abortion state senator Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball ...”

“... is through peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. In addition to being a vehicle for self-promotion, often at others’ expense, The Seven Daughters of Eve serves as a marketing device. The dust cover of the hardback edition proclaimed that Sykes ‘has always emphasised the importance of the individual in shaping our genetic world. The website ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.’ Jamal’s preferred position in relation to this fearful business is as an observer, in the background, watching. It’s as if he feels ...”

“... there was no need for a socialist tradition to combat the right or to advance the interests of a self-aware proletariat. Instead all shades of opinion across the political spectrum subscribed unselfconsciously to the American Way of Life, which Hartz labelled ‘mass Lockeanism’. Locke, he insisted, ‘dominates American political thought, as no thinker ...”

“... abstracted, inattentive, haughty-seeming; Carmel’s older brother, Richie, an alcoholic and self-confessed failure; their father, John, silent and invalided, devastated by the loss of his second wife, Rose; and Lucy herself, ‘known universally as trouble’. When Mia’s body is found on the estate the next day, her neck suspiciously bruised, Tom’s ...”

“... I was being paid to say what was there, not to critique it; but, where I could, I inserted a self-deprecating inflection, leaving my tongue in the great man’s cheek. These days, I usually get a couple of weeks with the manuscript before recording, to check pronunciations, especially pertinent with, for example, Brazilian Portuguese, which can be a ...”

“... Too often in history, it was argued, the vigilance and civic virtue required to sustain republican self-rule had dissipated, and the ensuing corruption, chaos and division had paved a path to dictatorship for a Caesar or a Cromwell. Republican government wasn’t thought compatible with territorial extent on the American scale. Small city-states had proved ...”

“... different stories and points of view. Here she accommodates herself, the author as sage. No longer self-effacing, she affects to be all-seeing. And what she sees is how little empathy and self-knowledge humans have.The bleakness is offset by acts of generosity and strokes of luck. Artie has the gift of precognition, and when ...”