“... survivors and brutality in the destroyers’; the one from Malcolm about the necessary violence of self-defence: ‘I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence, I call it intelligence.’ But the quotations are not there for what they say. They are there for the meaning of the two names, their evocation of what ...”

“... music of an early morning band achieved nothing which could not have been induced by exercising self-discipline at home, taking plenty of baths and drinking water from the tap, with perhaps the odd pinch of salts from the apothecary. But the water-doctors who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment ...”

“... does seem to relate to the way Bainbridge’s characters often encounter death when they’re most self-absorbed, most taken up with the temporary distractions of life. Chance tears through this false reality, revealing a world of instability and mortality. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that these themes are more prominent in Master Georgie than they ...”

“... of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted but, as her daughter Bridget tells us, she clings to the sustaining delusion that things might change:As with her hating ...”

“... revelation and concealment. There is a wanting-to-be-known that can desolate or undermine our self-sufficiency.And now, it seems, there are things about Philip Larkin that we’ll never know. So what? Well, put it like this, the loss can be made to sound not at all what Larkin, as we know him from the poems, would have wholly wished. But then again, who ...”

“... to Jerusalem’s Mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sacks challenged Barak’s decision with another of his self-important questions: ‘is it conceivable that the Jews of any generation could give away the holy of holies of the Jewish soul? None of us, not even a democratically elected Government of Israel, has the authority to abandon the prayers and dreams of a ...”

“... these intellectual capacities had to be turned towards the systematic debunking of superficially self-evident ideas – with the existence of God once again as exhibit A. Language itself, readers had to be taught, was inherently deceptive and subject to abuse. D’Holbach began to apply this idea to politics, claiming that ‘the true principles of politics ...”

“... the final two, the language of psychotherapy starts to play a crucial role. Though the jargon of self-help is mocked throughout, At Last is explicitly about ‘closure’. It turns on the realisation that Eleanor had not just been ‘the co-victim of David’s tempestuous malice’. The deeper truth, which Patrick can only now bear to contemplate, is that ...”

“... the sly.’) But of course he’s also gesturing towards his own role as a projection of the Hemon self, a self that’s been doubled, reimagined and refracted in four books of fiction so far without straying too wildly from the same biographical outline. Hemon – ‘pronounced as Haemon’, one of his avatars says – was ...”

“... similar diary of his Venetian stay seems to have been lost); and a riveting sequence of self-portraits in paint and in pen and ink, including drawings of his left hand and a full-length depiction of himself in the nude. He also wrote several poems of middling quality and copious notes and texts on art theory. Near the end of his life he published ...”

“... an irritable “What? What?” in reply.’ Lodge has set himself a difficult task with this self-portrait of an ordinary man who’s past his prime. In his earlier novels, he personified types or ideas and let the different subjectivities fight it out, with a bit of cheerful tweaking from him. Here, by contrast, he confines himself to one, unrelativised ...”

“... of hunters and filled many domestic pots. Hanna picks up strongly on the couple’s growing self-confidence, which was shown in the way they coped with the altered circumstances of their lives. Paul was obviously better placed to widen his horizons through his close contact with men from other backgrounds and other parts of France. He learned how to ...”

“... which the widening horizons of literature make possible, a desire for desire. Because of its self-reflexiveness, however, the true subject and feeling of his work is sometimes obscured. Most of the early writing about Mahon emphasised how glamorously well-travelled the poems were. Night-Crossing and Lives, his first collections, with their versions and ...”

“... half the length of the epic Clara, and a rich, flamboyant, mannered book, written with condensed, self-conscious stylishness, dazzling with images and sensations and violence, and daring you to resist it from its first outrageous sentence: ‘Francisco Solano López put his penis inside Eliza Lynch on a lovely spring day in Paris, in 1854.’ Clara is ...”

“... refined. He is a spectator, reluctant to obtrude on the world he describes with any importunate self-concern. His ‘way of seeing’ is supposed to emerge through description; ‘the object infused with the subject’ will refract the speaker’s feeling. But when he looks on the things of the world, Doty has, for the most part, only one ...”