“... and a faux-leather jacket; he’d worn a gold stud in his bumpy, porous old nose, and had pushed self-reliance and individualism and risk-taking in a hopeless tone, as if even he no longer believed in them. Once in a while . . . he’d say: ‘I coulda been a contender.’ Jimmy, too, coulda been a contender, but he is more interested in ...”

“... talented, witty, artistic, they said – and then one day she was middle-aged, frumpy, snobbish, self-centred, a raddled old gin tippler and a bore. So much apparent promise, so little follow through.However, all was not as it seemed to readers of Nanny Crawfie’s tales about Princess Margaret Rose in the 1940s, and to excited observers of the ...”

“... suffering, and to grapple with the question of whether suffering is an unavoidable part of self-knowledge (Chicago, £18). The bramble isn’t an uncomplicated metaphor: its prickliness is usually paired with a countervailing sweetness, the blackberry or the rose (Stewart also draws on the word ‘briar’ and its associations). If every rose has its ...”

“... than his defences. I knew what he meant. I told him I was trying to give Julian a crash course in self-deprecation, and would continue to insist that he not make himself the hero of every anecdote. I told Jamie the work WikiLeaks was trying to do might be bigger than Julian’s ability to articulate it. There was this incredible need for spy-talk. Julian ...”

“... imagining what it would look like if a society with no laws were turned over to the free will of self-denominated geniuses. Well, someone has done that, except it isn’t a book or movie, it’s a video game. BioShock, which came out in 2007, was conceived by Ken Levine and developed by 2K Boston/2K Australia, and is set in an alternative-reality version of ...”

“... The worry that the act would produce a deluge of litigation led by the wealthy, the litigious, the self-seeking and the self-righteous was one that, a decade ago, I shared. The reality has been encouragingly different. But the segment of the media that had already fixed on scepticism about human rights as its agenda has ...”

“... ashamed – that she turned in a rather famous essay on Montaigne (‘Montaigne: The Crisis of the Self’), that the professor (I’ll call him Charlus) confronted her in private, that he then told her parents, and that – unlike me – she’s never done any such thing again. Or to quote her recent email: [Charlus] first called me in to discuss. Something ...”

“... again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny). What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist ...”

“... in such ‘depressed areas’ as Wigan and Barnsley, and an indictment of the callousness and self-deception that enabled the comfortable classes to ignore such appalling conditions. Out of fashion today, Priestley may not seem to belong in this company, and I have to admit that I came to English Journey expecting sentimental uplift mixed with anecdotal ...”

“... influenced by the statistics on prison deaths: in the years between 1990 and 2003 there were 947 self-inflicted deaths in prison, 177 of them of detainees aged 21 or under. At the time the case was heard more than a third of the deaths – there were very nearly two a week – were of people who had not even been convicted of an offence. One in five of those ...”

“... chattering classes of ‘a crisis in French cooking’ hasn’t helped either – if not a self-fulfilling prophecy, it perhaps accelerates the ‘decline’ it purports to describe. The kind of food that is indeed ‘worth the trip’ is caught up in the perception of who’s winning and who’s losing in the fine dining race. (I can get from Boston ...”

“... conception of himself’. The unsettling thing about Gatsby was that he proved to have a self-image unalterable by defeat. Since his party was badly beaten in the mid-term election on 2 November, Obama has hinted that he may allow the 2001 Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 per cent to be continued: the very thing which before the election he said he ...”

“... a groundswell but more than a splinter-group.) There have been violent exceptions to the rule of self-restraint. On 18 February a wild man who hated taxes flew a single-engine plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas; a group of Tea Partiers mobbed the Democrats on the Capitol steps after the healthcare vote and shouted epithets at the lawmakers; and ...”

“... States, the times when I had been someone else’s Leonard Bast. The comparison is both acute and self-refuting – a Nigerian who has read Howards End will never be in the same shoes as the one who reminds him of Leonard Bast. Forster’s struggle not to condescend to his character is reproduced almost too faithfully in the way Cole deploys the allusion. The ...”

“... weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait out of the boxfuls of essays, letters and articles he did leave. These have been republished in multi-volume editions three times, by Forrest Morgan in 1889, by one of the Wilson sisters, Emilie Barrington, in 1915, and finally by Norman St John ...”