“... signs he detected early on. He’s a lover traduced, but is he right that Britain has become a self-harming, venal little nation since it spurned his affections? That’s how it looks, to be sure, and his evidence is depressingly thorough, yet he’s confident we brought this on ourselves and hopeful, for that reason, that we can come to our senses and ...”

“... bad to worse. I was 24, I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; and the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented. The whole business of being Irish in England seemed to me old-fashioned and, in tiny ways, ghastly. People thought I was amusing, in an ...”

“... horrified by vulgar public curiosity about his life – comes partly from the tireless project of self-presentation he undertook in his last decade: revising and collecting his fiction in the New York Edition, writing pieces of an autobiography, and burning piles of letters in an effort to guide future critics and frustrate future biographers. In recent ...”

“... with the woman he’s married to and actually loves.) Daum agonises; her husband proves a model of self-sacrifice; the marriage survives, even thrives. Others have abortions: multiple, matter-of-fact. Daum remarks on the ‘surprising’ number of pregnancies in these essays but it is fairly difficult to get through one’s fertile years as a ...”

“... those that warrant none, is actually a bit of a relief played against Fonda’s beatific and self-righteous Wyatt (think Earp), a.k.a. Captain America. But Billy’s meanness and scariness are startling. It’s possible to argue that it’s what redeems the otherwise self-indulgent film. Billy and Wyatt were never ...”

“... Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that ...”

“... who they are and how they are to live? Nussbaum is in effect saying to such feminists that the self-silencing brought on by their relativistic worries is no more justified than the silence imposed on feminist voices by societal misogyny or pig-headed colleagues. Having found our voices, we should not muffle or mute them in the name of an ...”

“... time, recognise a value of truth which is not just that – for instance, when we recognise that self-deceit is in itself not the best of states. Again, our ideas of truthfulness are under a great deal of strain at present. On the one hand, we tend to be pervasively suspicious, anxious not to be fooled, eager to see through appearances to the real motives ...”

“... both he and his nation were pliant to circumstance. Diaries tend to be written either by comically self-important Mr Toads or by Pooters – those who need to record their daily successes and triumphs over their rivals in order to be sure that they have actually got to where they hope they have got to. Pepys has traces of both Toad and Pooter, but he also ...”

“... the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon ...”

“... giving a shit”: what you would … or … wouldn’t do in order to maintain dignity and self-respect in the face of another individual or an institution’. It was about the mystery of those middle-class people who didn’t appear to care about keeping a clean house, while for working-class people ‘maintenance of ...”

“... careful, but be careful not to seem too careful: Dec. 14: Lunch with IH. Shifty fucker, absurdly self-conscious. Ate next to nothing and pretended not to drink. Even so polished off two thirds of bottle. Indifferent muck, thank Christ – not that he’d know. Wants something from me, I’m convinced, but what? Fidgeted throughout. Monosyllabic when quizzed ...”

“... looted vehicles, killed and humiliated people. They wanted to kill us. That was when we formed the self-defence forces.’ He had limited fighting experience. He had worked for the UN and African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur before it was wound up during the transition and had then turned to smuggling cars from Libya to Darfur. Since the desert was ...”

“... on Station Road they sell well at the expense of the low. 4. Stone Flung Near Head of Observer The self-propelled mower guided along firebreak regrowth, fresh growth, growth sticking its head up too high, to be lopped off, tall-poppied, struck a blow for neatness and order, and so out of Shire rules to prevent spread, prevent the roll of fires, appease nervous ...”

“... worst so mimetically maimed us as to make our – or anyway my – utter loathing for it a form of self-loathing . . . Fast-forward twenty-five years to my second exhibit: a campus in New England – old England on steroids; the hills pumped up into mountains, the little creosote potting sheds swollen to ark-sized dairy barns anchored on meadows big as ...”