“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... incongruous elegance. For this reason he is loathed. Academics hate him because he is not self-indulgent.’ Amis – who produced ‘the finest fiction … of the era’ – is picked on for similarly self-serving reasons: ‘The only comic mode now granted respect by the literati is the kind of surreal speculation ...”

“... Eily’s boyfriend Stephen recalls being off his head in Archway and hallucinating his younger self in the street: ‘That boy, looking beat to shit. After a couple of hours God began to explain. Remember this? Yourself?’ (God lapses into silence when he decides to jump off a roof.) In The City Changes Its Face, which continues the story of Eily and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nine or ten years old. And Isherwood was not the only one to be impressed by little Wystan’s ‘self-assurance’, his ‘clinical detachment’, his ‘air of authority’. Among his school-fellows, says Isherwood, he had the ‘status of a kind of witch-doctor’.This talk of clinics and doctors mainly had to do with Auden’s precocious know-how about ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... four decades. Has this poet been too humble? Or has he been too proud? Is he to be admired for self-effacement or chastised for self-absorption? Over the years, Thomas has asked himself such questions many times, and his replies have been as non-definite as ours. According to Thomas’s eccentric but industrious ...”

“... support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human preconceptions, even the deepest abyss was teeming with life. A ...”

“... dream was dreamed in unforgotten days’ only to flee in anguish from the spectre of her youthful self: ‘I am shamed/Before that little ghost with eager eyes.’ There appear to have been several reasons for her decision to kill herself – not the least of which, as Beckman sensibly suggests, was a biochemical tendency to depression. But it can also seem ...”

“... ancestors; by the end, du Maurier/ Ibbetson’s mother has become his daughter and his childhood self, his own lovely grandchild. Here was a storehouse of themes, to be raided by the real descendant throughout her life, from the ancestral time-travel of The House on the Strand to the spiritualist element in The Scapegoat or Don’t Look Now; from nostalgia ...”

“... in a review of author and book together. What made Our Age so arresting was its combination of self-promotion and self-flagellation, and Annan’s wistful reflections on the failures, as well as the successes, of his own generation. Put simply, he could scarcely conceal his pride in what he and his peers had achieved ...”

“... class he came from, perhaps because of his somewhat Rousseauian early upbringing (all that self-reliance), his lack of a public school education and his family links with the commercial world. He was a dogmatic free marketeer, a self-styled ‘anti-Jingo’ and an enthusiast for European nationalisms. He flirted with ...”