“... of modern Britain and that of previous centuries lies in our apparently insatiable appetite for self-serving political memoirs. Until this century, the genre was decidedly unfashionable – much less so, for example, than in France. It would have been considered disreputable for any 17th or 18th-century English politician to leave the kind of memoir written ...”

“... because that is a way of taking the story back from her subject, whose ‘mastery of the art of self-exposure’ was of course legendary. Brightman finds herself in the rather odd situation of deploring the prominence of the ‘Life’, of wanting almost to drape it in shadows, make it private, but having to settle for exposing the over-exposure – ‘Her ...”

“... well as a transcendental aspect. ‘For Lawrence,’ Jacques Berthoud speculates valiantly, ‘the self has a centre, which is the subjective life of the body, and a circumference, which is the outgoing life of the mind.’3 Lawrence felt that mind and body do not settle into a fixed relation, but rather interfere constantly in each other’s designs. In ...”

“... government never moved too far out of contact with the governed and that the masses would grow in self-reliance. Society would then be in every respect self-governing: it would spontaneously generate its own orderliness, and government’s role would diminish almost to vanishing point. Between 1868 and 1900 the smallest ...”

“... and a History of the English People, starts his third excursus into universal history with some self-interrogation. ‘Why have I written a history of the Jews?’ he asks, and offers four reasons. Three are variations on the theme of simple curiosity: nobody who had written a history of Christianity could help being curious about its progenitor, nobody who ...”

“... the students of today. He agrees with many people that students today are relativist, shallow, self-centred, unread, moved only by the wild uncivilised strains of pop music, and incapable of forming and appreciating deep and lasting attachments. Bloom’s criticism is unusual because it involves no hope that improving American universities will result in a ...”

“... Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He is a difficult character to get into perspective. Most Australians who might be in a ...”

“... a pretty unlikely proposition. Coming second is a more reasonable ambition, because only your own self can really be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and ...”

“... headlong gallop into problems as complex and intractable as language, altruism, religion and human self-consciousness itself. The puzzling question about language, as Darwin observed, is why linguistic ability hasn’t evolved in other apes as well as humans. In both humans and other primates, there is a correlation between increasing group size and increasing ...”

“... it will not be possible to exonerate her from the ultimate charges of corruption and betrayal of self ... The genius is the only type of human whose agenda is pure enough for his [sic] motives to be incontrovertible. Lillie was not a genius.’ One of these women devoted her accidental gift of beauty to carving out a vivid, hectic and erratic life of her ...”

“... even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment’). The writing of an ‘Ode to ...”

“... refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident particular: ‘faux ...”

“... the sign of a primitive culture, we – this would seem to imply – have the novel; and the more self-consciously civilised among novelists have sometimes been anxious to disclaim the form’s own origins. As E.M. Forster wearily put it, ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ But storytelling will outlive the novel, and it is also elemental ...”

“... of Sennowe Park for Thomas Cook’s grandson. These houses were for social advancement, self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, where display meant more than beauty, opulence was preferred to taste, and wealth mattered more than lineage. Harold Nicolson explained: Edwardians were vulgar to a degree. They lacked style. They possessed only the ...”

“... literary property whose manifestations range from memorable poignancies of anguished belonging, self-division and loss, to a vulgar stereotype of vaguely dyspeptic graciousness, all mint-julep and magnolia and nagging resentful memories of old gallantries downtrodden. From Warren at his best, as from Faulkner, and the Allen Tate of The Fathers, we expect ...”