“... been raised. Le Premier homme is then, by Camus’s standards, a plainly conceived book: it aims self-consciously at the lyrical only once, and in a revealing connection (of which more in a moment). You might say that this was to have been his version of Les mots, the book that Sartre disingenuously claimed was his ‘farewell to fine writing’: the book by ...”

“... at this ingratitude, but his own account suggests ample cause for it. The trouble was that self-appointed experts from further east were forever telling the independent-minded settlers what was best for them. Eastern Montana was apparently so empty, so devoid of physical and social culture, that it could serve as the laboratory for any harebrained ...”

“... were communal and physical – football, rugby, brass bands, dances, bowling – or to do with self-improvement: evening classes in drawing, politics, local history, literature. The ethos was philanthropic and optimistic. Working men’s clubs, institutes, social and recreation clubs; all were built to answer the general call for the good and uncostly use ...”

“... that he, Brivati, is not (he was born three years after Gaitskell’s death); nor is he bound by a self-denying ordinance, as Williams was, to refrain from discussing his subject’s private life. What that discussion entails is a possible homosexual involvement at Oxford, when Gaitskell was part of a gay circle around Maurice Bowra. All one can say about it ...”

“... of Listless Gluttony’, ‘A Blissful and Drinkable Eternity’. The essays are undisciplined and self-indulgent, both in spite and because of the arcane references and scores of footnotes: The mirabilia of the charlatans, the ‘secrets of deception’ (‘they make people appear without heads or with asses’ heads,’ noted Pietro Passi, author of Della ...”

“... and to no one but yourself. That Bradman was a ‘natural’ was never in question; he was a self-made master in an aspect of cricket, batting, whose best-loved movements – the off-drive, the late cut – are far from simply natural. The 1930 tour, when the 22-year-old Bradman had scored with such destructive ease off all the English bowlers, led ...”

“... as far as possible, that the harsh necessities he imposes on the people are regarded by them as self-inflicted. Above all, the executive, the prince and the statesman must manage the smoke and mirrors of public morality so that the two things the common people are most impressed by – results and appearances – are kept firmly and unscrupulously in ...”

“... images variations on one another? Others are moral. For example, are the drawings of crouching, self-absorbed women voyeuristic intrusions or celebrations of privacy? And some questions, which now turn out to have straightforward answers, arise from conflicting accounts of how Degas lived his last decades. The answers to these, according to ...”

“... dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!’ Burns was a ‘self-fashioner’ who used his poems, prefaces and private letters to project an intensely attractive and social personality, which makes it unsurprising that most people were struck by him in much the same way. Verdicts on the career, on the other hand, tend to ...”

“... Leo can only marvel, in his secretly comfortable way, at what he feels to be the extent of her self-deception. Wright takes for granted that Hartley’s inability to come to terms with his own sexuality ruined his life. But there seems to me no evidence for that at all. Both as artist and as social being Hartley found a way of doing very nicely for ...”

“... it seems, is expected to respond critically to Delphine’s flights: if she is to some extent a self-portrait of her author it is not an uncritical one. Delphine’s imperfections are, however, high imperfections, like those of her important predecessors, Julie and Clarissa. Delphine can also be seen as a reconsidering of Madame de Lafayette’s La ...”

“... much as toast, which he pursued and devoured in prodigious quantity. Being an invalid, even if a self-made one, Mr Woodhouse’s interest in food in Emma is specially keen. One of his chief pleasures in life is recommending dishes to his friends, such as lightly boiled eggs, but only as they are done by his own housekeeper. Another of his pleasures is ...”

“... his own admission is a liar, a humbug, a hypocrite, a vagabond, a loathsome spotted reptile and a self-confessed chicken strangler. You may choose if you wish to believe the transparent tissue of odious lies which streamed on from his disgusting, reedy, slavering lips. That is entirely a matter for you. We have been forced to listen to the whinings of Mr ...”

“... Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ...”

“... than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They ...”