“... 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 ...”

“... to a woman he hopes to make his lover. He wishes to explain himself, and embarks on a Rousseauian self-analysis that occupies all but the final pages of the novel. Though Félix comes from an aristocratic family, he has much in common with Balzac: he is an overlooked younger son, and endured a lonely and miserable childhood, neglected by a cold, distant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his sons would have had much greater opportunities to enjoy and consolidate their debauched and self-indulgent idea of monarchy. If Victoria rather than Albert had died in 1861, Edward VII might have reigned and rogered for fifty years, which would surely have tried the patience even of the long suffering Queen Alexandra. If Edward VIII had not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... things, the assured place of the artist, his or her necessary significance within the culture. The self-cure for insignificance is paranoia, and Trotter’s Paranoid Modernists are marked, above all, by a sense of what is unbearable about modern life. They weren’t exactly trauma theorists themselves, but much of the writing of the period has a manifesto-like ...”

“... and which he reiterates throughout the book. Europeans are now Kantians, seeking to inhabit ‘a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation’. The United States, by contrast, ‘remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable’. He goes on ...”

“... be time to retire this little observation. Like Dave Eggers, Smith is interested in contemporary self-consciousness. Insofar as she is a moralist, she is a moralist about this. She is always pointing out that her characters, on the brink of a momentous access of feeling, are undermined by their sense that they are not being original, that TV has preceded ...”