“... classy Arthur Hailey. Janet Malcolm credits her ‘Aaron Green’ with a sympathetic line in self-satire when he recounts that his training analysis was conducted by an analyst who had himself been analysed by Ferenczi, who had been analysed by Freud: ‘I could thus trace my analytic lineage back to Freud. You smile, and you should. It’s a ...”

“... comfort remains unclear. Hillier hints that Betjeman’s energies being directed towards his own self-satisfaction may have made him a less than exemplary father, although his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, clearly adored him – of his relationship with Cavendish, she has written, ‘I found the situation completely without conflict’ – and her ...”

“... commercial enterprises founded by imperially minded Scots were increasingly swallowed up by the self-same global economy they had once helped to promote. Thus Coats textiles still keeps its headquarters in Glasgow, but 80 per cent of its profits now come from thirty developing countries. ‘We follow growth,’ its chairman made clear in 1981: ‘our ...”

“... at least at the secondary-school level, in ‘a world of horrifying inequities’: ‘The self-containment of boarding school can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it’s March, or to receive an SUV ...”

“... assume a formal pose, staring into or just past the camera. Warhol, too, was interested in the self-presentation of representative types, though his work was not as encyclopedic as Sander’s. The subjects Warhol screen-tested could be classified as musicians, actors, dancers, poets, painters, art critics, curators, gallery owners, performance ...”

“... in particular, is widely taught and universally admired. The protagonist of McTeague is a self-trained dentist, famous for extracting teeth with fingers rather than pliers. Brutishly strong, he leads a life of animal contentment, working all week and then spending Sundays eating, sleeping and playing a few songs on his concertina. His routine is ...”

“... she barely knows; in this book it is a painting that is similarly bequeathed. In each novel the self-interest of the male survivors frustrates the bequest, but the house and the picture still end up where their owners wanted them to. These parallels continue. Forster, as has often been noticed, has on occasion a certain peremptoriness of manner. He brings ...”

“... the sense of not being able to grasp true religious experience’. Oswald’s poetry is much less self-aware and, thinking itself capable of this giant ‘grasp’, sometimes drifts into a hollow theism. Poems in which God is name-dropped from nowhere seem like empty icons: shimmering slightly, but with a wooden dullness behind the eyes. There is a poem ...”

“... his work, this aims at virtuosity but expresses something completely different: the terminally self-conscious voice of English fiction; condemned to facetiousness, to trifling forms of cleverness and irony. In England, England, something similar happens at the level of genre. The novel is written in at least three different modes. It contains a clever ...”

“... for economic transformation, and Todd comes up with an unexpected explanation for their canny and self-interested behaviour. When we imagine a typical interwar worker, it isn’t as a bob-haired 14-year-old shop assistant wearing her first pair of heels. Contemporary commentators and officials didn’t notice such workers either: Orwell thought them ...”

“... policy varied according to the everchanging circumstances of the Jews, its limits were defined by self-interest.’ In other words, there may have been times when, either because of public pressure or out of a need to keep the Americans (who had Jewish voters to worry about) onside, it was necessary to appear to act, but the limits on what might be done were ...”

“... to live as they think fit. In short, to act tolerantly one must employ practical wisdom, exercise self-control and sometimes show courage and generosity. Which then is to be preferred, toleration or its successor ideals? Glen Newey does not address the question directly, but his closely reasoned book gives us cause to believe that neutrality and sensitivity ...”

“... it’. No longer the Cold War prophet, Custine emerges as a gifted, alienated individual, whose self-absorption makes his account a faithful record of his own obsessions but a dubious authority on Russia. If we are still drawn La Russie en 1839, it is because it confirms our prejudices so ...”

“... to the Lord’s anointed?’ Alter notes the piety of David’s words but also their political self-interest because now ‘he alone is the Lord’s anointed.’ One issue which such carefully ambiguous narrative raises is the extent to which the reader or hearer is encouraged to think of Yahweh as a fictional construct used first by the prophet to keep a ...”

“... of life without the boredom of its conveyance’; ‘the grin without the Cheshire cat’; his self-descriptions are unbeatable.) Sylvester notes how his reliance on photos left him disoriented when confronted with living models in the 1950s – a disengagement from traditional skills that would become institutionalised in the era of Warhol. The mastery of ...”