“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”