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“... not need to know this but I need to tell you – is merely the converse of the darkly enigmatic self-tormentor, with his one virtue and a thousand crimes. Good writers soon grasped that the best way to deal with this hero is to place him in the most equivocal dimension possible, by means of different narrators, or variously subtle forms of ...”

“... violently emotive to Saint-Just himself, and that he carried this meaning, with all his stunning self-assurance and self-righteousness, intact into the storm centre of Revolutionary politics. In ‘De la Nature’ Saint-Just took the theoretical framework of European natural law and contorted it to express his own hectic ...”

“... the portraits left by Nadar, is in many ways a capital document for understanding the tormented, self-destructive trajectory of his ‘life’. Gaëtan Picon remarked that in the Nadar photograph of 1862 the 41-year-old Baudelaire looked as if he were a hundred (Baudelaire himself, in one of the ‘Spleen’ poems, made it a thousand). The face, above all ...”

“... directed to elevating the minds of the humbler classes. Birmingham, on the other hand, was more self-interested but also more aesthetically aware, and a number of local collectors were amateur artists themselves. Macleod relates these differences to the industrial character of the two cities: the textile manufacturing of Lancashire was big ...”

“... to ‘I’, and edging just a little further over into fictionality with the invention of self-made hero Tom Owens, the multi-millionaire founder of a West Coast biotech company he christens ‘Genesis’: ‘He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom.’ But the story’s focus, the person whose point of view we share, even if ...”

“... is William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my grande époque.’ Will is 25, from a recently aristocratic family (his grandfather was ennobled for his services as Director of Public Prosecutions during the Fifties): he is ...”

“... possibly even ‘make me more careful to do well’. At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal ...”

“... Americans that there is nothing to be ashamed of – not only no disgraceful actions but no hidden self to be disgraced. What unconscious force then substituted ‘stupid’ for ‘stubborn’? No force at all, only a glitch in the transmission, the meaningless celluloid stutter of Gary Trudeau’s merciless caricature, Ron Headrest. The President moved ...”

“... One of the ironies of the so-called mourning process is that it tends to make people even more self-absorbed than they usually are; in need of accomplices, but baffled about what they want from them. In actuality what the mourner wants from other people is so obscure, so confounded that religions are usually still needed to formulate it. Even secular ...”

“... clue as to what points are going to be important later, and is liable therefore to engage in the self-defeating task of trying to keep a grip on all the twists and turns of the discussion. In the end, Part II is not dependent on a lot of the detailed analysis offered in Part I. Elster does indeed sometimes refer back to it but I think that anyone who wants ...”

“... to be sure. For the picture is not only contradictory, it is also deceptive: a carefully contrived self-image masquerading as a spontaneous and unself-conscious record. The pensive pose, with the left hand on the cheek, and the gaze wistfully directed towards some distant horizon, was deliberately struck by Elgar while a lunchtime visitor went out to get his ...”

“... at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual’. For this she suffered a strong sense of guilt, as she ...”

“... often are in less successful Betjeman, and in the Burgess parody. The thing is completely rapt and self-absorbed. We meet the window again and learn something else about it. She bolted the big round window,           She let the blinds unroll ... The nurse’s activities, soothingly purposive, ungracefully habitual, dominate the poem, sinking to a ...”

“... qualities seem almost to be deliberately sought, partly as an antidote to false comfort and self-deception, partly from obscurer causes that are hard to divine. The heroine of her latest book Loitering with Intent is a young woman setting out on her career as a novelist in the early Fifties; and she distinctly plumes herself on her ungenial manner of ...”

“... The piece was laudatory – excited, even exalted: it argued for special qualities of sympathy and self-effacement on the part of a writer long thought of as richly self-advertising, which were held to impart a balanced view of the human realities that constituted the Gilmore story. I wondered at the time whether this praise ...”