“... Larbaud’s story, both a homage to the secret transition from girlhood to womanhood and a self-examination of male vanity, is structurally quite different from Humbert Humbert’s autobiography. But there is more than a flavour of the ‘subliminal co-ordinate’ in that passage, and in the domestic situation and the personal. Edith, Queenie’s ...”

“... of a cat, or, God forbid, ourselves, is nauseating. The heartiness of surgeons and butchers is a self-protecting acknowledgment that even when they break into bodies for the best of reasons, and even when the bodies are not human ones, they are doing something indelicate. An exploration of the dark continent within when it could only be done by way of ...”

“... of Macedonia), involved much rhetorical nonsense and, on two occasions, the imposition of a self-defeating trade embargo, but comparatively little violence. The anti-Macedonian campaign was a sick affair, for which Greece has rightly paid a heavy price. But by the time of CUP’s change of heart, the campaign was over. CUP were more justified in arguing ...”

“... years or more, 70 per cent were having affairs. There is a lot of deception around; some of it self-deception. Eighty-two per cent of women believed that their husbands were faithful: but earlier Hite research showed that 72 per cent of men who had been married for over two years were seeing other women. These statistics do seem to contradict one’s ...”

“... wrote his appreciation, W.F. Ridgeway, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, allowed himself the self-indulgence of hind-sight in an address to the Conference of the Classical Association: ‘for the last two generations British men of science ... aimed chiefly at being the first to introduce into this country the last thing said in Germany, even though that ...”

“... early as 1868. Admittedly the demonstration was in a remote and inaccessible learned journal, but self-respecting scholars should have known about it. Most did not – or if they did, they found its arguments too painful or inconvenient. Consequently the forged collection continues to be quoted as authentic down to our own day, even after Beales’s own ...”

“... undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s confidence that a reasonably large readership will be fascinated by the whims, fantasies and extravagances which spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like ...”

“... into the document-shredder of the University of Hull. The biographer who will need to salvage this self-torpedoed section of the life is none other than Andrew Motion. The only small addition I can offer the impeccable Register is over the entry for Compton Mackenzie. The compilers rightly list a large manuscript holding by the Humanities Research Centre at ...”

“... the Thirties, when he finally sealed off his servile kingdom from the West. Apart from a little self-taught German, he spoke no foreign languages. He made only four trips to Europe during his life. And he never wore a suit or necktie in public, but appeared in Asiatic military garb. A second source of insecurity, which increased as his career ...”

“... it has induced a 17th century turn of phrase – or indeed, of mind. And the entire book is self-consciously in the form of a series of meditations of a doctor-philosopher, a sort of Religio Medici for our times. He condenses images into a dense, suggestive mass; he adores infinity. And then one stumbles over a piece of nonsense. ‘What does a father ...”

“... and derives much of its inspiration from Proust – specifically, from the Proustian project of self-creation through writing. Shammas wants to invent himself, just as he wants to reclaim his past, through the writing of his novel. Anton goes to Paris, where he pays a visit to Proust’s grave; then, as the beneficiary of a creative writing programme, he ...”

“... been killed, ‘but resorted to it only for raisons d’état or in what might laxly be called self-defence.’ Perhaps the argument itself is rather lax. Only psychopathic dictators ‘revel’ in killing; the others revel in power and, like Asad, are often prepared to kill a lot of people in order to keep it. The second point is that Mr Seale has not ...”

“... a solution, and no one else has got one. The Right has retreated into paper-profits, the Left into self-administration, and down the middle has come, not the Alliance nor the SDP nor Kiwi-fruit sorbets for all, but tower-blocks with the lifts turned off to save money and ‘creative design’ jobs in their turn superannuated by computer technology. Everyone ...”

“... his other book, Adventures of a Younger Son, not wholly fiction, but notorious for its fantasy and self-aggrandisement. Had Trelawny been nothing but a braggart, his lies would diminish him; ironically, because his real life was to become, for a while, so genuinely romantic and melodramatic, his fabrications seem to add yet more brio to the larger-than-life ...”

“... of having to justify her nature or her ambitions. The diaries disclose an unusual degree of self-consciousness together with an unrelenting need for control. Her day-to-day life was hardly solitary. Yet she was lonely, and knew it. The society of equals was perhaps what she wanted most, and accounts for much of her unlovable wish for aristocratic ...”