“... 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 ...”

“... exist, such as the unity of identity and non-identity, as well as some that do (love, poverty, self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has ...”

“... is useful to contextualise him. Stephen Calloway does this with deft authority in his essay ‘The Self-Fashioning of an Artist’. It’s in his milieu, the fluid fin-de-siècle of the 1890s, that Nicholson comes into focus as a personality and an artist. With Max Beerbohm, Edwin Lutyens (a close friend who was responsible for Nicholson’s trip to ...”

“... an ‘enlarged forum for experience and exploration’ where the young could be enticed from their self-preoccupations by exposure to varieties of otherness, and in so doing effect their passage from adolescence to adulthood. The unzoned and permeable ‘survival community’ Sennett sketched in 1970 was intended to show how an ‘integration of ...”

“... if he is always fed when he is not hungry but simply troubled, he may evolve a sense – a virtual self who believes – that what he always really wants is food). Ideally, childhood is a series of reciprocal accommodations – or ‘attunements’ as they are now often referred to, in an uneasy mixing of analogies. But however much psychoanalysts go on ...”

“... is at once subject and object of his or her narrative, a fissured soul striving impossibly for self-coincidence, for that magical moment when the writing subject and the subject written of will merge into an imaginary whole. The prototype of this process is Oedipus, the detective in pursuit of the criminal who is himself. Michael Owen starts out as the ...”

“... as legend is less to do with the quality of his writing than with his wilful mirroring of the self-destructive, drug-centred lives led by the rock stars he writes about. Kent made his name in the mid and late Seventies as a strung-out stringer, the suburban boy getting high with Keith Richards, hanging out at backstage drug binges, and – on one ...”

“... global war and double-think acts of terrorism have very nearly erased the line once drawn between self-mastery and self-indulgence. The line was once an enviable statement of human potential against the historical background of centuries of cruel behaviour. Slowly and painfully there occurred a change in manners which ...”

“... the embodiment of Thatcherism, a man who has risen from the ranks of the poor and whose belief in self-help and the virtues of the free market is unshakable. The simultaneous publication of their memoirs therefore affords an interesting X-ray picture of Mrs Thatcher’s governments and of a Tory Party which has altered radically under Thatcher and ...”

“... accounts. The principal exception is at the other extreme: Hannah Arendt’s rebarbative, self-indulgent biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the most celebrated of these Jewish hostesses. Hertz dutifully mentions and a few times cites, Arendt’s book in passing and then moves on. What she moves on to is other historians and a generous sampling of social ...”

“... complicated character, witty and disaffected, veering erratically between arrogance and acute self-loathing, the ways in which he’s attractive aren’t immediately obvious. In the first few pages he describes his reaction to receiving a posthumous parcel from his youngest daughter, who killed herself four months before. ‘I thought Sadie had done ...”