“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”