“... only in its engaging underlay of humour. Harriet is one of those narrators who are skilled in self-delusion, who make plain to the reader things they prefer not to acknowledge themselves – in this case, the rottenness of Crishi, who is on the make, and worse. (He is, in fact, a cad whose literary ancestors may include the central figure in Francis ...”

“... a quite large number of British citizens. To begin life in the working class, climb out of it by self-help and the educational ladder, and find oneself, in early adulthood, living in a world almost inconceivably different from that of one’s childhood: the familiar story was successfully told by Richard Hoggart thirty years ago, and it was a recurring topic ...”

“... Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams because, unlike his, they are real. His solace is a black taxi-driver, with whom he cruises innocently at ...”

“... He remained basically a short-story writer, whose later works became increasingly literary and self-referential. He rewrote Marco Polo’s conversations with Kubla Khan in Invisible Cities, and, in If on a winter’s night a traveller, he produced a novel both containing and commenting on the first chapters of a whole series of imaginary novels. The ...”

“... Which also explains why Ismail Kadare is big in Italy and France (where he has lived in semi-self-imposed exile since 1990. The blurb says that he now divides his time between Paris and Tirana). Besides, it is unfair to judge his work in double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from translations into French by the ...”

“... field’ for a common American culture. Seeing themselves reflected through Rogers’s self-effacing eyes, Americans moved through Indian dispossession, war, depression and class struggle while remaining on familiar ground. In what Ray Robinson calls his mode of ‘polite but sly insult’, gentle mockery was inseparable from national ...”

“... try to implement the UN resolutions? No, because the Americans need us. Because, contrary to what self-righteous European columnists write, stability in the Middle East is not a necessity for the US. What are the lessons America can learn from Israel? First, that enormous damage was done when pictures from Sabra and Shatila were sent all over the world. So in ...”

“... them. One of them may be said to originate with Hawthorne, the other with Melville, one lean and self-absorbed, the other heavy, expansive, determined to contain a world. On the whole the heavyweights have prevailed in recent years; one no longer hears much talk of, say, Glenway Westcott, a lean writer of whom Gertrude Stein remarked that ‘he has a certain ...”

“... men played then. Real good players.’ I’d watched young men at pool in Rock’s Coffee Shop, self-confidently rolling with their sea-ice cakewalk round the table: denims and bandanas, outdoor-booted, quietly competitive, but less to win than figure a trajectory, the likelihood of one uncertainty against another, the slice, clack and negotiated tangent to ...”

“... and criminal are connected – they are brothers, secret sharers, divided halves of the same self. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, the investigators find themselves taking on many of the outward roles of the men they investigate: they live in their rooms, perform their jobs or wear their clothes. By the end of both novels, the detectives have ...”

“... in the case of Viagra. But isn’t it the case that you’re simply vain, the product of a ‘self-absorbed’ 1960s generation that doesn’t appreciate your father’s war-forged discipline and sacrifice? No. It’s that our culture has left me with little other territory on which to prove myself besides vanity. I mean, in the ornamental realm, manhood ...”

“... of propaganda films, it was not politics, or even patriotism, that inspired Olga, so much as self-preservation. Never allowing her Russian name and origins to be a liability, she somehow managed to remain a star. It was only in the closing weeks of the war, as the Red Army neared the German capital, that she had to face up to her divided loyalties. In ...”

“... He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times. Immediately beforehand, Stefan has been politely snubbed by a distinguished elder statesman named Harold Gedney. His hostess introduces him as ‘a wonderful dissident poet’ who has fled from East Germany some ...”

“... the common good. The ‘common good’ is a great soundbite, and Martines holds that only the self-interested – beneficiaries of corruption and tyranny – will stand against it. I wonder. There is Isaiah Berlin’s objection that goods are incompatible, and the Thatcherite objection that it is an excuse for getting somebody else to pay for what you ...”

“... ranks of the middle classes, real and aspiring, expanded to include railway conductors and clerks, self-employed merchants and shopkeepers, factory foremen, detectives, butlers, book-keepers and bankers, it became something of a uniform, indicating an acceptance of modernity. Early 20th-century photographs of street scenes and Sunday picnics show a sea of ...”