“... 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 ...”

“... Hofstadter’s earlier books. In particular, there is much material revolving around the ideas of self-reference and its relationship to consciousness. Here, to give an example of hardcore Hofstadterismus, is a telling passage buried for the assiduous or serendipitous reader to spot in the bibliography: Gebstedter, Egbert B. Thetamagical Memas: Seeking the ...”

“... Conversely, Life goes on, like most fiction nowadays, is not free of the heavy hand of writerly self-consciousness. Virtually every (male) character here is at once an actual rogue and a potential writer. Cullen in his less frenetic moments sits down to write a novel on his father’s behalf which brings home the prestigious Windrush Prize. His friend Bill ...”

“... urgent, impressive. As a result, in no other literature is the writer so much a performing self, as Richard Poirier has observed, and in no other literature is such a premium placed on raw data and its virtuoso delivery. The American interest in ‘fact’ derives from the same complex of attitudes. One can see it not only in the regularly contemptuous ...”

“... to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we ...”

“... an aesthete fostered some paragraphs which are subjected to a withering critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack My Bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it ...”