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“... policy belongs to a world of morality and high-mindedness: it is determined by realpolitik, self-interest and imperial ambition. Indeed, he declares that all these various adventures – Bosnia and Kosovo as much as Afghanistan – are part of America’s imperial project. He accepts that Bosnia remains in a mess, with no end in sight; he admits that ...”

“... is, or was (maybe it has pretty much gone out in our post-Wolfenden days), an acting-out of self-hatred or desperate self-mockery. The thought occurred to me recently on seeing a production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was ...”

“... signal. Michael hits the booze a little harder and begins to regret his contempt for the ‘self-conscious libertines’ of his vitalist canon: ‘If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to re-examine everything now.’ Enter Lara Purcell, a glamorous, cosmopolitan political scientist. Lara is from the Windward Islands, exotic and ...”

“... Miller was, in fact, like so many in those years, a sort-of-Marxist committed primarily to self-discovery and the ousting of Fascism, and the plays, where they are at their best, survive as artworks more for the self-discovery than the anti-Fascism. Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and After ...”

“... it isn’t hard to guess where he is heading: Darwin’s ‘noxious ideas’ about ruthless self-interest had, we are told, ‘a direct and disastrous influence … on Hitler’ and on ‘the social programmes of the Third Reich, culminating in the Holocaust’. You do not have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist to think that natural selection will ...”

“... all of that. But nothing else – nothing hard or kernel-like.’ Instead of a stable narratable self, the best Bascombe can manage is a sort of default one, adopted to reassure others. Given his disjunctions, reassurance isn’t easily provided. He’s earnest but doesn’t take himself seriously; hard-working but prone to ...”

“... be true enough: Murphy, de Acosta and Garland were all formidable women, largely unacquainted with self-pity. But not only is Cohen being a bit perverse – the salvage operation here is grand and thrilling – she sounds a tiny bit wishful too. Her overriding purpose, she writes, is to convince the reader that her neglected heroines deserve to be recognised ...”

“... of an audience with little grounding in classical literature. It can sometimes seem a little too self-consciously pitched at a student market (it’s a surprise to find Burrow declaring that ‘Shakespeare was a sceptical kind of guy, and Montaigne was a sceptical kind of guy’), and occasionally the compression necessary for a volume of this sort can make ...”

“... never have been planned on a drawing board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived.’ This is not, the narrator insists, ‘evidence to be claimed by religious or other creational mysticism’, but is greater than any collective mind or faith. Perhaps, ‘whatever civilisation does to destroy ...”

“... house in Stratford, fussing with his lawyers over the disposition of an ample estate, the private self revealed in the Sonnets safely back in the closet. If we think of the end of Marlowe’s career we see a dangerously, glamorously mixed-up 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last ...”

“... a sapphic swive-hound for the ages like Patricia Highsmith. God, was she depraved. Prouder of her self-styled ‘erections’ than a Proud Boy. Yes, rilly. (‘I’m not a woman,’ she was often heard to say.) But wouldn’t even Pat have found the slender yet muscular barbarian, caped in pelts, inky blue ‘sleeves’ covering both his arms, the tiniest bit ...”

“... relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up against the ‘dream of womanly self-effacement’ that she diagnosed in her elders:From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and ...”

“... denounces him.Indeed, the whole of his oeuvre has been read as an attempt to bolster his self-confidence. His critics declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish ...”