“... than his ability to deceive others, and it looks as if he, or some part of him, did genuinely and self-deceivingly believe that he was mustering, in Nicholas Mosley’s words, ‘a fascist movement dedicated to peace’ and ‘an army that would march to prevent future wars’. He even managed to persuade himself that had it not been for this ...”

“... and an artless one; few public figures can be less concerned with the presentation of self, less calculating of the effect produced. Hence the famous gaffes. The foot went into the mouth quite early. At a first night of Romeo and Juliet in 1919, Ellen Terry’s last professional appearance, the Terry family was out in force. Gielgud’s ...”

“... fiction and drama to the living language, and to a conception of literary study as a form of self-development rather than a means to acquire objective knowledge. (Where the journal was comparatively weak, or saw no need to compete with the academic establishment, was in the historical understanding of literature.) As time went on and Golding and his ...”

“... basic message was that Israeli occupation must be ended, that Palestinians have a right to self-determination, and that they intend to pursue it unrelentingly until they achieve statehood. The Intifada, he suggested, had already begun to build the institutions and infrastructure of the Palestinian state. On the other hand, he accepted the need for a ...”

“... drinking club. Especially (but not exclusively) on the left, it was also a culture in which self-education, conspicuous erudition, even philosophical speculation were tolerated as they were not in other union cultures. The brightest star in the left firmament was the Fife miner, Lawrence Daly, who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the ...”

“... but functions more as a travelogue of truncated dreams. This would be fine if it was written with self-conscious humour, but Sacks continually tries to redeem the minor key of the story with grand claims for what to the lay reader seems only a mildly interesting situation. Colour-blindness – complete achromatopsia, seeing no colour at all, only degrees of ...”

“... Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks expresses the hope that ‘such cruelly self-righteous impercipience’ was later recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I had interpreted that admonitory statement about things done to others’ harm ...”

“... different from our own state of mind, and duly led the Abwehr, in the matter of subversion, to one self-inflicted disaster after another. The wonderful fictions evolved for enemy consumption by MI6, invented by the Garbo ‘network’ and recently explained in detail by HM Stationery Office, were far beyond the prudent Abwehr, while not a single Abwehr ...”

“... about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between literature and politics, America and the world, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane. And we get the goods not just about his sex life, but about his sexual nature.To get the ...”

“... to speed to the brain like a tug on a bell-rope. Pain was the bell, a literal fire-alarm for self-preservation. This physiological representation of pain as a beneficial reflex mechanism, a warning system, appealed to anatomists, reinforcing their ‘all is for the best’ vision of the perfection of the organism. Neurology confirmed that human behaviour ...”

“... from the opening of a new Congress to a Kiwani Club dinner, would launch into perorations of self-praise about what made America and Americans God’s chosen country and people. These, he thought, were self-comfort sessions, the expression of a deep underlying in security. Mills would find the new South Africa a ...”

“... Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment ...”

“... way in which he nurtured his art to the exclusion of all else. He was one of the most ruthlessly self-protective artists who ever lived. ‘I shall not visit my children during Christmas leave,’ he wrote to his wife in December 1941, ‘they should be able to retain the impression formed of me for another three months. I can’t afford to waste any time on ...”

“... The distinction, tilted towards novelists, makes writers seem stuffy, even preachy, certainly self-absorbed. Between Sterne and Goethe, Flaubert and Chateaubriand, Calvino and Montherlant, who would you choose? Certainly Golding and McEwan are novelists in Kundera’s sense, but they do make an issue of their ideas. I’m not suggesting that they push ...”

“... its concomitant scorn for ‘thimble bellies’), Sayre recalls it as celebratory: ‘of the self and of friendship’. She quotes A.J. Liebling: ‘People whose youth did not coincide with the Twenties never had our reverence for strong drink ... It was the only period during which a fellow could be smug and slopped concurrently.’ As long as he ...”