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“... 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 ...”

“... that achieved that must be celebrating its triumph; why won’t it let me join in? [Of his self-hatred] This opinion is my only good point. [Of suicide] If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn’t need it. [Of the TB which was to kill him] It’s a special illness which has been, if you like, conferred preferentially, quite unlike any ...”

“... trends, restraining reckless middle age. The novelty of 19th-century generationalism lay in a new self-consciousness about generational differences, and a desire to discover in them some historical dynamic. The result was a good deal of tediously abstract speculation about the length of a generation, the manner in which it acquired its characteristics, and so ...”

“... After all, their function is to provide myths for scribblers. And who cares anyway? – the self-justifying memoirs of today’s criminals soon turn to dusty junk. Who can blame Biggs for cynicism after his attempt to come clean with the Daily Express and thereby give himself up, only to be instantly betrayed and done out of his agreed £35,000 by the ...”

“... flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion ...”

“... to give us an account of ourselves. The nub of Taylor’s position is the claim that man is a ‘self-interpreting animal’. One way in which a human agent differs from other animals is by the possession of a conception of himself, an understanding of who he is and what he is doing. An agent’s self-understanding is not ...”

“... and personality, is somehow more reassuring and constant than her relation to her own remembered self. Mirror Writing discussed dandyism and style informally, as one of the ways in which identity is constructed. Adorned in Dreams continues and considerably extends this discussion in much more concrete terms. The book is, as she says, an attempt ‘to view ...”

“... in fostering a new, virulently anti-Soviet ‘politics of interest’ – or, some would say, self-interest. I’d also heard that he was becoming very fierce about gays, dykes and nukes – indeed, any new or fashionable grouping that got in the way of the immediate and pressing task of rebuilding American morale. It was easy to see, then, that he was ...”

“... its influence on western thinking. In the latter, she suggested that to be human is ‘To name the self, the world, and God’, and that this power of naming has been stolen from women, now as much as in the Adamic myth. Gyn/Ecology extends that argument and is, as she says of its title, ‘a way of wrenching back some word-power’. This involves linguistic ...”

“... way his generation is going; what he hasn’t got is a language to make us sit up and listen. Will Self’s idiolect is more inventive than Bracewell’s; the suavely metaphorical turn of his prose and the yawning insolence of his tone are far more captivating. But Cock & Bull has none of Bracewell’s amiability. It consists of two novellas, the one the ...”

“... oblique insult by implication: but he sees the texts written out of this mentality as essentially self-consistent, plottable within a narrative of Neronian history. In Political Dissidence under Nero (1993), Rudich showed something like a blind faith in the ‘sources’, and imagined a challenging ‘dissident sensibility’ in the Julio-Claudian élite. He ...”