“... green peaches’). Sport, then even more than now, was the proving-ground of American virility and self-respect. How good you were at games determined how respected you were in the society of boys; how much you were noticed and doted on by adults, especially men; how much you thought of yourself. In baseball Ryan enjoyed one spectacular season as a pitcher by ...”

“... about that?’ sort of way) and politely suggested I call a truck rental company. A shop that had self-help manuals to cover every crisis of American life, from starting fourth grade to burying a pet, could only offer the Yellow Pages when it came to house moving. Not so in Britain, where moving house is always big news. And not so in my local bookshop in ...”

“... Indeed, there are moments when the reader feels that the author comes closer to being damned by a self-indulgent infatuation with words. There is a preciousness to many passages, a quality of the ‘set-piece’ and of an over-contrived ‘poetic’ style, that can be both irritating and embarrassing. It would be nearer the truth to say that this is the story ...”

“... conflicts. Its very existence offered the promise of a world in which the short-term goals of self-interested states and leaders would be constrained by generally agreed rules and procedures, allowing the long-term common interests of peace and co-operation to prevail. This promise is fast disappearing. The US, the world’s sole superpower, now sees ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pessimism. A very different mood could also be found in Enlightenment Britain, as austerity and self-denial, those old-fashioned Protestant virtues, succumbed to what Samuel Johnson extolled as the ‘innocent pleasures’ of money-making. Acquisitive ‘passions’ previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as ‘interests’, while ...”

“... previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions over and over again, and feature endings that seem determined to mock and disappoint.‘A writer needs some direction,’ Vesta tells herself in an extended dialogue with the mystery-writing advice page,some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”