“... to the music of bands like the Replacements who sang tepidly defiant sagas of generational self-pity: ‘We’re getting no place/As fast as we can.’ Moody situates a gallery of burned-out kids in the toxic environment of northern New Jersey – the landscape the sociologist Donna Gaines has called a ‘teenage wasteland’. The ‘chromium ...”

“... unless Canetti was thinking – as I doubt whether he was – of the best-selling genre of self-help, personal growth books. I don’t mean to suggest that the Analects is guided by the aim of advising others on how to achieve therapeutic, romantic or financial success; but stylistically there is a strong similarity. That said, these chunks do add up ...”

“... that ‘inserted into the metaphorical anus of greater London, Jonson begins his life by eating self-consciously recycled excrement.’ As a subsequent upward mobility virtually turns his whole career into an ‘inverted figurative peristalsis’, it becomes difficult to resist the final ‘troping’ of both life and work as alimentary. In this ...”

“... rehearsing. She drinks too much; is haunted by a woman with a striking resemblance to her younger self; criticises the script and forgets her lines. Everyone is obscenely nice to her and she doesn’t care. Finally, she turns up on opening night paralytically drunk and goes bonkers on stage. Her moment of clarity arrives when she sees her arrogant ...”

“... keeps out of the way), her frequent references to her instruction in political economy (a self-serving doctrine) and her faith in the workings of Providence (‘I have always been guided for the best, hitherto,’ she says, ‘with an innocent and unintentional profanity’). This is a small world, with skewed priorities and proportions, and ...”

“... the most famous golf links in St Andrews, he ‘laid aside the obligation to be Borges, the public self to which his writings bound him’ and which he describes in his famous short fiction ‘Borges and I’. In another essay, ‘Digging up Scotland’, Reid again recalled Borges reciting Border Ballads and said he had been ‘much affected by being in ...”

“... that the existence of slavery undercut the moral legitimacy of the white South’s claim to self-determination. Fair enough, except that the same could be said of the Revolutionaries of 1776, most of whom were slaveholders. In the end, Farber’s discussion of secession reveals the enduring power of Lincoln’s idea that the US is not like other ...”

“... about welfare are likely to focus on the extent to which depending on others has to erode the self-respect of recipients and undermine the respect others have for them. Sennett thinks it quite possible for welfare agents, social workers and volunteers to treat their clients with respect, but doing so requires that they not blot out or occlude the ...”

“... full of irritating sub-Joycean rhymes and puns, seem the work of a writer struggling to fulfil his self-imposed schema. Cloud Atlas (2004), Mitchell’s third novel, has the most elaborate schema of all: six narratives embedded one within another, like a set of Russian dolls. The journal of an American notary crossing the Pacific in the 1850s is interrupted ...”

“... 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee also ...”

“... addressed as if it were produced in a void, and each individual novel is treated as if it were self-sufficient, and bore little relation to anything beyond the reality, or fantasy, that it described. When critics look into Narayan’s work, it’s as if they see only themselves: the ‘timeless India’ they discover in his fiction is a mirror, or a ...”

“... was not going to be numbered among the great American writers of her generation. The gloomy and self-dramatising tone is characteristic. In fact she was exceptionally robust, and nothing could break her. She went on writing for years, and lived to see a flurry of interest in her work before she died in 1902. But she never earned the public recognition she ...”

“... Ascendancy, are exemplars. The Anglo-Irish were notoriously eccentric and swashbuckling, full of a self-vaunting swagger that the less admirable side of Yeats found appealing. The wild old wicked man, as he liked to see himself, would link arms with a bunch of crazed, colourful peasants in opposition to the merchant and the clerk. Social conventions were for ...”

“... has already been lost. In the US and the UK inequalities of market income (wages, income from self-employment, dividends etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first ...”

“... has a reputation for cockiness, but like a lot of cocky people his problem is not excessive self-belief but its opposite. His writing is often stagily masculine, like a sensitive adolescent who swears too much at not quite the right times in order to show how manly he is. He isn’t, as Byron said of Keats, always frigging his imagination, but he often ...”