“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... battle with a mass of defeatisms. He was plagued by, as he described it, a ‘dissolution of the self’. Or was it, he would wonder, that he did not have a real self at all? ‘Bovarysme’ was another of the insults he heaped on himself. He had written, intermittently, throughout the 1930s, without succeeding in getting ...”

“... in general. Why would the Society of Jesus prove more tricky? Well, there is the long history of self-advertisement, which has sometimes seemed to be one of its special characteristics, and the equally long history of hostility and denigration; picking your way between the two is probably not the ideal method of getting hold of the real and substantial ...”

“... be making a wry comment on her husband’s profession – the writing of novels could be seen as a self-indulgent and sterile occupation. Developing, if unconsciously, the metaphorical potential of the theme, another character, Jocelyn, says later that what she ‘can’t be doing with are novels about the trials and tribulations of middle-class North London ...”

“... A new year​ ! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more reliable indicators of the passing of the years, and so it will continue until the demise of print ...”

“... It is an idea that is at the centre of the book. Jack/Toby never feels he has arrived at his true self, his identity is always shifting. Dwight presents him with endless chores, and endless analyses of his faults. Wolff resists the temptation of gaining retribution with his writing, of lapsing into self-pity or ...”

“... range from the famous ones concerning the meaning of existence and the search for the true self to the less advertised but equally common one of how to survive the whips and scorns of time. Ernest Cotgrave, a Nottingham lad, begins his career à la Scheherazade, by taming the school bully – ‘Mek … summat … ’appen’ – with highly-coloured ...”

“... show you Hell!’ For Hell, as Shelley said, might be a city Much like London, dressed in cold self-pity Fanning-out in grids from dread of death, Its towers of hate above, its sewers beneath Where flows the dreck of self – the squares, the prisons All at the service of destructive visions. This in my chill mid-morning ...”

“... act ... she does not suffer ... she does nothing.’ Her writing, on the other hand, is painfully self-revealing. Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, she is unfailingly perceptive about the arts of acting and film-making. The description of Pabst’s direction of Pandora’s Box is one of the best things in the book: Alice Roberts came on the set looking chic ...”

“... and of the deflowering of Europe – the latter being a far less engrossing subject to this sexy, self-centred girl. The value of her diary lies in its artlessness. Here is femme moyenne sensuelle, unashamed, with nothing very noble or sensitive to commend her. The Diary of Virginia Woolf it is not. But she preserves for us the street vitality of a certain ...”

“... of better, against the money and security Laurie offers. Must we still marry Jo off in 2020? When self-partnering is a thing? When all she wants is to be independent and earn the praise of those she loves? Gerwig slips the noose ingeniously in a way I won’t spoil.I envy girls their literature. There’s no literature about getting old, staying in (or ...”

“... them. The social butterfly was also a very hard worker. Perhaps it was because he put so much into self-promotion and self-presentation that he had such a fine instinct for the way others could look. His identification with beautiful people was profound.Yet all these pictures together make a rather dull show. They are too ...”