“... can be called that, is a chastening example of how an excess of piety can imperceptibly turn into self-aggrandising ...”

“... at least as a realist but I would say also as a stylist, been running on empty ever since. His self-esteem tank, in bold contrast, has been filled to overflowing. As he instructed us all, in ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in ...”

“... eyes, Laura was ‘the real beauty’ of the three Marx sisters. She was also strong-willed, self-confident and a staunch atheist. Arriving at a Hastings boarding house for a holiday with her little sister in the year she met Lafargue, Laura immediately told the landlady that the two girls had no intention of attending church on Sunday and could not ...”

“... leader to praise Syria’s leader as a man who had made his country strong, independent and self-confident was strange enough. For President Asad to have called the Prime Minister-elect a ‘strong and honest’ man who could deliver peace with Syria was extraordinary. Seale was amused to note that Barak likes to doodle when speaking, illustrating his ...”

“... along the shore at Margate, subjected to the white noise of puns, submerged quotations, barks of self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat ...”

“... Milosevic or Saddam do? They were sitting ducks. The attentats of 11 September have altered this self-assurance. Here indeed was an unforgettable spectacle, designed to mesmerise the West. The target of the attacks was the US, not Europe. If the European states, Britain and France in the lead, joined in the counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their ...”

“... from which sufficient ore could be extracted to make the operation profitable. Miners were usually self-employed and working in groups on a claim; technological limitations meant that seams could rapidly become worked out if they were not substantial enough. The mining history of the period consequently revolves round a sequence of discoveries and their ...”

“... whom even on his best day should want to be judged next to Karel on the merits of character. The self-absorption, the petty rivalries, the absurd, childish, overweening demands, the ravenous greed which characterise in varying degrees the behaviour of the rest of us never appeared to engage Karel sufficiently to make any claim on him. My experience with him ...”

“... from Armida is prompted by shame and rage at the reflection of his curled hair and effeminate self in a shield. The poem also tries heroically to weave passionate love, which had driven Ariosto’s Orlando mad, into an argument for voluntary servitude. Erminia, who was captured by Tancred, then freed by him, remains a slave to him in love, and ends the ...”

“... and the Masses: that works of literature are variegated and disruptive, that they are frequently self-divided, that they may rebel against the ideologies of their creators and that they can’t be pillaged for compliant quotations. It is just this that Carey seems to discover about Brighton Rock, a novel he used in his last book as an example of Modernist ...”

“... certainly a goodly number fashioned from whole cloth. The inventions and embroiderings were not self-aggrandising but meant only to amuse. Alldritt exhibits some canniness in his siftings and winnowings. Bunting always thought of himself first and foremost as a Northumbrian man. His mother’s father was a mining engineer and colliery manager from ...”

“... of going beyond thought. ‘There is no other way,’ wrote Ashbery with bitter accuracy in his ‘Self Portrait’,                             and those assholes Who would confuse everything with their mirror games Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or At least confuse issues by means of an investing Aura that would ...”

“... Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973 and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the old historians.’ The old historians, in contrast, had been ‘highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth’. It was Simha ...”

“... Shaw is particularly sharp about Brittain’s treatment of Harry Pearson, a good-looking, self-pitying wastrel who drifted in and out of Holtby’s life, engaging and annoying her in equal measure. Holtby had known him since they were teenagers in Yorkshire; he had written her some youthful love poems but the relationship never developed much beyond ...”

“... for her (successful) audition for drama school, and so on and on and on. The errors and haste and self-regarding irrelevancies would be forgivable if there were some real muscle under all the cellulite, but Cash never decides what his book’s actually about. It’s a ‘detective investigation into fact and fiction’ in Greene’s work (and how we tire of ...”