“... i.e. the writer he is hopefully pursuing.’ Pritchett was thinking here of his much younger self, who set off for Paris with a patchy, truncated education and a series of unsatisfying jobs behind him and an intense, but still vague and wholly unrealised, aspiration to become ‘a writer’ in front of him. ‘When, at 20, I got out of the train in the ...”

“... preferred and widely recognised style was henceforth officially to be the family’s style, his self-presentations theirs. In response to his nephew’s complaints about these practices, he at one point excuses his meddling by claiming that it was a compassionate response to a plea he had imagined coming from the dead, his brother calling out: ‘Oh, but ...”

“... antagonism or independence. But there is a poetry of pliancy which differs from mere propaganda or self-abasement. In this poetry, the words on the page bring with them an awareness that they might have been different: the strain on the bent knee is kept in view. No one, after all, would take praise in a panegyric as being merely true: the ‘judgment’ it ...”

“... In one disarming passage he describes capitalism as a ‘a non-violent, civilised mode of material self-enrichment through market exchange’. What makes capitalism toxic is its expansiveness, its relentless colonisation of the rest of society. Drawing on Karl Polanyi, Streeck insists that capitalism destroys its own foundations. It undermines the family units ...”

“... short of embracing the full implications of his insights. Having identified the stultifying ‘self-system’ created by social and parental pressure to conform, he had failed to mount the aggressive challenges to family and society that should have followed. Instead, like his more conventional colleagues, he had limited his goals to helping patients ...”

“... the details of his battling life became publicly known and he was sanctified. The image of poor self-sacrificing ‘St Charles’ has been a hindrance ever since.‘We have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In ...”

“... address what he was avoiding and what he was clinging to – attachments that a life of prayer and self-examination are supposed to make clearer. ‘Never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another,’ wrote Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer; ‘never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.’Cecil was a ...”

“... A novel where the time and place of the murder are announced in advance in a newspaper ad. The self-conscious, formalist impulse behind Christie’s work is the explanation for one of the biggest puzzles about her books: why the most popular detective writer of all time had as her principal character a man who is, by general agreement, the worst detective ...”

“... was, in Polanyi’s view, not the result of socialist intervention, but rather the self-correcting method of economic liberalism itself; his main source for the details, if not the interpretation, was A.V. Dicey’s Law and Public Opinion, first published in 1905.) The analytical underpinning of this historical generalisation lay in Polanyi’s ...”

“... at the time’, just after Fassbinder’s death. ‘Circa 1982-85. Completely unbalanced and self-indulgent. Dissolute, unconventional, ablaze.’ But he wasn’t really capable of doing so – all that is ‘everything I’ve left behind’. And though anyone wanting a straight biography or analysis of Fassbinder’s work would be better off looking ...”

“... Pacino comes across as possessing a curious mixture of ambition and lack of it; of swagger and self-effacement. He seems to have believed fiercely in his own art, but he was far more interested in the work of acting itself than in climbing the ladder and says he never had any interest in having a career. Probably the most important relationship in his ...”

“... the hospital for weekends, slapped me for ‘the look on my face’. I can’t bring myself to get self-righteous about it. I think it must have been terrible having someone look at them the way I did. Insolent, uncaring, challenging. And they’d snap. At the time, after telling my father I’d been sacked again, I really didn’t know what my belligerent ...”

“... of innocent Sikhs by Congress-led hoodlums. Like Mrs Gandhi in India, America has been a great, self-appointed proponent of democracy in the modern world, while, in actuality, it has treated it as a nuisance and an obstruction when it gets in the way of its self-interest. It now justifies war by speaking of the ‘will of ...”

“... philosophy. Professor Arrowsmith in his enthusiastic introduction calls the essay ‘pure self-projection’, and reads it as an assertion of intellectual independence. A declaration of war on the current notion of philosophy as practised by ‘academic ruminants’ is what Nietzsche himself called it, but of course it is a declaration disguised as ...”

“... forced her children to hate him; she was rightly ostracised by her neighbours for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly victimised’ her hapless rival, Jessie Chambers; and so the character-assassination goes on. Meyers portrays Lydia as a toxic personality; and because she set out to dominate everyone around her, it was only rough justice when ...”