“... be typical of Fisher if his gesture towards a popular readership proved yet another route to self-effacement. Until he was about forty, Fisher lived almost continuously in Birmingham. The city was his imaginative centre: what Paterson had been to Williams and Gloucester, Mass. to Olson. Those American precedents would come to matter over the years, but ...”

“... he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘Thatcher years’? The rich ...”

“... that Church doctrine and social custom imposed on sexuality drew especially vigorous criticism. Self-proclaimed libertines rejected constraints on premarital virginity and conjugal fidelity, heterosexuality and monogamy, chastity in women and chivalry in men. Evolving from the mid-century contributions of Diderot and Crébillon fils, libertine fiction ...”

“... recourse to the I Ching and interviews with friends who are mothers.The ceaseless metaphysical self-inquiry of Heti’s books is a maddening, but accurate, depiction of a world in which one cannot boil an egg or clean a toilet or get married without wondering whether there might be a more optimal way of doing it explained in a video on the internet. Heti ...”

“... and the schizophrenia disproportionately experienced by the area’s migrants. Migration is a self-splitting, one note observes; it’s ‘psychotic to live in a different country for ever’. In 2012, Kapil returned to the UK and lay down near the house in Lansbury Drive, Hayes, where she grew up. From pavement level, she could sense the weird electric ...”

“... novice architect’s path of trial and error, boredom and setbacks, but was always resilient, his self-belief keeping him buoyant. Sandy Wilson, the designer of the British Library, who met him soon afterwards and became a close friend, had ‘never met anyone who was so deeply convinced of his own significance’. Despite the dead-end jobs and unsuccessful ...”

“... with a powerful sense of historical destiny. John Lydgate’s Troy Book provided the defining self-image for Henry’s regime: the British, like the Romans, were refugees from the ruins of Troy and now, like the Romans, they would conquer an empire. This confident sense of imperial mission faded as victory turned to stalemate, but the classical idiom that ...”

“... the line moves.’ The line is a hair. The distinction between good and bad marginalia is no more self-evident than the distinction between antiques and junk. Readers of a used (or should that be ‘pre-owned’?) book must face up to the evidence that someone else has already been there: far from exploring virgin territory, we become only the last in a ...”

“... are plain-living, selfless and even saintly, while others are envious, untrustworthy and self-seeking. Some anti-egalitarians are greedy, complacent and callous, while others are open-handed, fair-minded and genuinely committed to the well-being of their dependants and subordinates. But that commonplace observation is no help in the quest for a ...”

“... polite society accepted the open-mouthed smile. Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun’s ‘Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie’ (1786). Wariness of the laugh (le rire) among classical and religious authorities had cast a shadow of disapproval over its diminutive, the smile (le sourire). Aristotle may have noted that laughing distinguished mankind ...”

“... their lives, and objective analysis often takes second place to the resurrected details (revealing self-made success, lost grandeur, anti-authoritarian spirit or helpless victimhood) that best confirm the values of the investigator. Trained historians observe, sometimes disdainfully, that such researchers are looking for archival comfort food. The two breeds ...”

“... he would be overcome with tides of irritation, disgust and childish resentments (though not of self-pity). He would seethe against nurses, matrons and doctors, resenting their friendly overtures or exhortations to be stoical. Whole days would pass for him, too, in deliberately organised daydreams, in which he would minutely explore an imaginary ...”

“... no one is willing to come close enough to tell me why the fuck should they I wouldn’t be my ugly self Mary might have been very shy and into herself I got smashed and watched TV was she smashed she said so She quickly discarded the Kerouac mode for more complicated bricolage – short novels that sporadically morphed into poetry or theatre scripts. She ...”

“... by mouth’. During police questioning, Eric comes under suspicion: the cops mistake his self-loathing for guilt. In scenes told almost entirely in (often very funny) dialogue, he doesn’t help himself by being unable to disguise how much he despised the victim: ‘Sometimes it feels like everybody I know down here went to the same fucking art camp ...”

“... most fictional elements.What first appears to happen is this. In 1988, 28-year-old Saul Adler, a self-described minor historian of Eastern Europe, preparing for a research trip to East Berlin while grieving for his working-class communist father, is grazed by a car on Abbey Road. He is involved with a glamorous young art student called Jennifer Moreau, whom ...”