“... 1948. The wartime ideologue Ishiwara Kanji, called as a witness, argued against the tribunal’s self-serving mandate of investigating events only from 1928 onwards. The causes of the war should be sought, he argued, in the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Perry’s demand that Japan open its doors to friendship with the United ...”

“... calls out Background! and hired New Yorkers begin to pass behind the perfect field, a little self-conscious, skaters and shoppers too slow to convince, so they try it again, Clarissa passing the sandblasted arch bound in its ring of chainlink, monument glowing grey against the grey. * A little less now in the world to love. Taxi on Bleecker, dim ...”

“... interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was briskly despatched to relatives for the holidays, and only reunited with her parents at the age of ...”

“... to regard the 19th-century Rothschilds as bankers, plutocrats and social climbers than as the self-appointed spokesmen of ‘the Jewish community’. And in the East End of London, the elemental problems of working-class life – birth, survival and death – were essentially the same, regardless of ethnic identity or national origin. If it is difficult ...”

“... and finance boom of the Eighties, small, independent publishers, able to expand thanks to the self-same boom, fall over themselves to plug the gap. Virago Crime, Women’s Press Science Fiction, and a welter of smaller, now failed imprints, were and are a mixture of the odd inspired reprint, a lot of ‘rediscovered’ second-raters, and new material ...”

“... days he attributed everything to the Divine Will. The activities of this marvel or monster of self-deception are recalled by his son with a flat literalness more effective than moral indignation or satiric exposure could ever have been. ‘He left us all his egotism, as our mother left us her racing tongue’ is the final word delivered, not by the ...”

“... Though Jenkins is wry and penetrating in peeling the Gladstonian onion of its infoliated layers of self-righteousness and self-deception, this is not an exercise in diminishing the Grand Old Man to a silly old man (or even a dirty old man). His fame inescapably stems from the eminence of his political career although he was ...”

“... his gnawing hunger for advancement, his insatiable appetite for intrigue, and his odd mixture of self-importance and self-doubt. He was a fusser, a buttonholer, a clasper of shoulders, a pacer of lobbies, at least metaphorically a listener at keyholes, endlessly obsessed by the narcissistic gossip and jockeying for ...”

“... affair, as he weeps into the phone under her unrelenting stare. His first feeling, he says, was self-loathing, but ‘next I hated Mother, not passionately, but with an icy revulsion.’ That a progressive moral collapse should follow – hippiedom, then the army – is hardly surprising. He has been robbed of identity at every level. Enjoying equal status ...”

“... readily, if not exactly cheerfully. It’s tough but it’s right.’ This suppression of self is even invoked to explain Olivier’s early sexual failure: ‘In the first years of Vivien’s theatre-acting there was not the passion, the flare, the flame necessary to set the stage alight. It was therefore hard to make her understand, at those times ...”

“... tragedy. Its force lies in its striking deployment of the argument for collectively redemptive self-criticism. But Habermas is not easy to read. It is not just that he writes very badly, like many men struggling to articulate a vision that is obscure even to them. It is also that he writes within the German tradition of Kritik. This comes down at least ...”

“... early experiences set one’s life in certain rigid patterns, which resist or deflect attempts at self-examination. In my opinion, these are second-decimal arguments. As long as they are not anchored in anything which I am given reason to think is true, they appear as free-floating exercises. It is like watching a game without knowing what the ground rules ...”

“... that an actor might roll about his tongue. The principal narrator is Roy Croucher, an unreasonably self-satisfied Londoner, in his fifties, with experience of jungle warfare in Malaya and a subversively conservative attitude towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust ...”

“... Thus, Nichols presents her own history, and her family’s, as a story that is both highly self-conscious and almost implausibly apt for the present day. Her mother stood up to Al Capone’s brother, who then said to her father (after she revealed the hidden six-shooter): ‘You’ve got yourself one helluva little lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself ...”

“... down to see whether one of these sentences isn’t poking out of her side.’They’re also less self-enclosed than they appear. The surreal images in The Book of Words, and the monologue’s disjointed structure, eventually resolve with disturbing clarity: as an infant, the narrator was taken from her birth parents, who were ‘disappeared’ in a dirty war ...”