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“... and each other as endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not merely is this true: it is self-evidently true (and you cannot readily get truer than that). Nozick himself keeps his cards close to his chest on the matter of what (if anything) does make his initial claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those ...”

“... the rather dinky, miniaturist feel of that term – prefers to style it, with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘a very short novel’. Either way, the text takes up less than a hundred pages, and does little to dispel an impression of slightness – in volume terms, at least – in his fictional oeuvre. He has, of course, written a great many other ...”

“... to keep yourself safe ... In short, you can become a little Odysseus, lying, disguising your true self.’) And some of the more interesting contributions (by Charles Martindale, for example, and Vanda Zajko) take the time to reflect on the perils of writing about oneself, and on how far the written self must inevitably be ...”

“... try too hard. The stance of ‘promise-victimised’ was picked up early on. At first, it was a self-defensive social ploy but over the years it was coaxed into a thoroughgoing style: a life-style and a work-style. Observing the dinner-table impact of lordly non-producers like Logan Pearsall Smith and Desmond MacCarthy, Connolly in his mid-twenties realised ...”

“... life among husbands and children and gardens,’ Lilia, who’s 81, reflects. ‘I’ve lived a self-contained life. I’m what you call a happy woman.’ Happy, except for the fact that she’s been ‘arguing’ for 37 years with the ghost of her daughter, Lucy, who committed suicide at 27 and left her child, Katherine, to be raised by Lilia. Lilia has ...”

“... is incisive, apparently insightful and certainly idiosyncratic. His faux-reticent third-person self-criticism established him as a more intriguing figure in readers’ minds than any of the public figures he skewered with practised astringency. Reading it now, the Education seems more mannered and ponderous than Galsworthy and Mann’s sagas, but its ...”

“... know that beneath all exteriors lie subterranean streams and caverns where the private, unknowable self contradicts the stated desires and achievements of the visible life. A biography, these days, must be a tale of the unexpected. Wouldn’t modern readers feel cheated to find that Antonia White and A.A. Milne were wise and devoted parents, or that Larkin ...”

“... must have suspected that there was more to this than meets the eye. Was Catullus parodying his self-importance and the orotund symmetries of his prose? Would he be immortalised as the sort of person who would swallow something this bald? Or were these just paranoid imaginings? Modern readers are in much the same situation, not sure whether we are in on the ...”

“... Shapiro asserts that in Shakespeare’s time literature was ‘rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation’, and that ‘autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual.’ It is certainly true that the relation between life and art was then understood very differently from the ways Romantic poets, Victorian novelists or modern ...”

“... as that painting – so claims the novelist Dan Brown, incorrectly – is an ‘androgynous’ self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Moss’s ‘gamine look’ has a similar ‘sexual ambivalence’. Susannah Frankel, a fashion editor at the Independent, has made the same comparison: ‘Kate Moss is a modern-day Mona Lisa. Although at times she might appear ...”

“... narrowed eyes? The fear that you’ll realise the truth about us? That we are, deep down, self-disgusted losers? Or maybe we’re afraid you won’t notice. It doesn’t matter how many books we’ve sold, or whether we’ve been on Letterman or Oprah. We’re nerds. Dorks. Putzes. Schlumps. And we don’t want to let you forget it. In his first two ...”

“... I nibble leafage’. Some readers sympathise with the narrator while others find her appallingly self-absorbed and demanding, but no one has criticised Rush for his ventriloquism. I suspect this is not because he managed it so well, but because by situating most of the novel in Africa, where he lived and worked for six years, he was shielded by the authority ...”

“... greatest theme. Some of Hogg’s poems in the Spy, as Scottish poems like to do, trumpet a rather self-satisfied nationalism. Scottish writers are too fond of gazing at the thistle. Over the last few centuries, canny Scottish writers have liked to hustle, often embarrassingly. Boswell was self-consciously, sycophantically ...”

“... the remarkable success that it did – and continues to do. It certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman (Raverat was well over sixty by the time the manuscript was finished). And it includes a handful of brilliantly told ...”

“... life, which is unsatisfying for both parties because Carmel is relentlessly practical and calls self-reflection having ‘too much imagination’. Felim is bad, but none of the novel’s male characters are much to write home about. Nell’s university friend Mal is flaky and given to disappearing acts; her housemate Stuart leaves his washing in the ...”