“... is made that much more efficient. In practice, the theory ignores both irrational fashion and self-serving motives. Quite often these days employees are fired whenever their labour can plausibly be held to be expendable by executives high or low eager to show themselves ‘hard-nosed’ and thoroughly up-to-date with the latest management-consultant ...”

“... to inhabit provided equally sad and delightful anomalies, occasions for compassion, ridicule and self-display. Presumably in reasonably secure conditions, Wilson, ‘wearing flame-coloured pyjamas and carrying a madonna lily’, played Buggery in an Oxford show of the Seven Deadly Sins. In an age when it was dangerous to advertise homosexual inclinations he ...”

“... although I doubt whether he is a believer, he has at times a kind of mechanical nonconformist self-righteousness about him.’ Others called him the Scoutmaster General. This was, of course, the golden age of another Congregationalist, Harold Wilson. Though his much misunderstood resignation from the Attlee Government in 1951 had identified him as a ...”

“... On the day the author is approached by Hubert and Rysio, two old lags from the Underground, the self-styled ‘keepers of a dying flame’, themselves ironically three-quarters dead, with their outrageous and bland request that he sacrifice himself for their cause – he is after all, expendable – on that day, Poland is receiving a state visit from its ...”

“... house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental ...”

“... uprisings into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian’, almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world – to say nothing of the written archive of pre-20th-century ...”

“... more isolated than ever before. Contemporary rhetoric – the talk of ‘caring’, the self-celebration and the pious toughness – conceal an authoritarian certainty that the good society can be created by an alteration of attitude, a shift in moral direction. Like Clintonism, both the new feminism and the new radical centre are resolutely ...”

“... she rejects the question. ‘She’s all sorts of woman,’ Jo says – and so is Jo. ‘My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it.’I can’t think of another play that gives such an unvarnished portrait of the exigencies of motherhood: of what mothers give and resent giving, of what ...”

“... family, in 1927. His determining characteristic, it struck me, was the pride of the electively self-condemned. He lived and thrived on his difference, choosing to remain at an oblique angle to fashion, publishing a successful novel in Paris, receiving the benediction of Julio Cortázar, and then waiting almost thirty years before releasing another. Living ...”

“... Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People ...”

“... they made a happy threesome, with Meredith posing for a picture of the poet Chatterton, dead after self-poisoning. Judging by Wallis’s amiable teddy-bearish persona in his letters (he lived into old age, became a significant collector of Italian and Islamic ceramics and adored his son, Felix), we might wager it was the dissatisfied wife who made the first ...”

“... heard of a “Bo-da” meeting, nobody ever heard of suicide hotlines, nobody ever heard of any self-help programme – wallowing in self-pity with only a touch of stylish irony was the only idea. And I loved it for its fearless wrongness.’That was the year of her accident. Babitz refused to address her brush with ...”

“... humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The first volume of the new decalogy by ‘Scientology’ Hubbard has ...”

“... for the good of the trade, acknowledging his depravity so as to indicate their own capacity for self-regulation. Instead, they closed ranks. They understood that the reputation of the British slave trade was at stake, that it would be difficult to separate the charges against Kimber from the larger allegations the abolitionists had made against the ...”

“... the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of sub-Maigret detectives propping up an unchanging social order, Manchette attacks de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic for its secret violence ...”