“... definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written On The Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new’. Her latest also bears a Winterson-accented description on its jacket: ‘Art & Lies is a rich ...”

“... Pipes. He decries the ‘archetypes’ which these authors find in the Russian psyche: a lack of self-worth, intolerance of the opinions of others, and a mixture of spite, envy and worship of external power. Worst of all is the sadomasochistic Russian admiration of brute force and the desire to be dominated by a strong master. These traits are doubly ...”

“... Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!’ He also dwelt on self-annihilation, and in his last years made a cult of death. In this country his reception has been less than tumultuous. Carlyle, liking the idea of self-annihilation, and also finding in him a sympathetic tendency to ...”

“... That principle survives because it evolved a style, a subtle and endlessly productive form of self-revelation. Argufying is a book of wonderful sentences rather than wonderful arguments. The sentences are wonderful because they are so unflustered, so undesigning, so remote from any intention to be wonderful. Their most characteristic gesture is the ...”

“... Author’, in Acrimony). The estrangement is not exactly personal, because the father is so self-absorbed, abstracted and prematurely old. In ‘My Father at Fifty’, from Acrimony again, Gert Hofmann can no longer maintain his ‘marvellous, single-minded regime’. Things are different now ... Wherever you are, there is a barrage of noise: your ...”

“... beginning, ‘The hills are shadows, and they flow ...’ And so in other places. While in the self-borrowings Tennyson is essentially stabilising an often torn and tormented mind by mustering evidences ‘of the continuity of his own creativity’, in the echoing of great poets who have gone before him he is seeking to enjoy ‘in the face of lonely ...”

“... the ‘diabolical’ personality of Blunt). The British are perhaps unusually prone to voluntary self-deception where the morality of people in public life is concerned. A moment of very pure humbug was reached in the Blunt affair when the Observer printed as proof of his depravity a story about Blunt disparaging a man behind his back after being ...”

“... Bernstein, between a ‘collection curriculum’ in institutions of education, which consists of self-sufficient and separate subjects, and an ‘integrated curriculum’ which does not. The first of these is associated with authoritarian arrangements and Louis Dumont’s homo hierarchicus; the latter with democratic arrangements and homo aequalis. They are ...”

“... the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.’ Self-parody, of course, counts among those games-playing activities of modern fiction which stress its self-sufficiency and its incapacity for saying anything about life. No good Burroughs ‘extending his vision ...”

“... lingo I suspect a corpus of knowledge about the place is necessary to understand that strange self-contained world on the banks of the Thames. The instant effect of Dixon’s photographs on one of my Labour Parliamentary colleagues who himself had left school at 16 was one of relief that his childhood had not been spent in such fraught circumstances. What ...”

“... Amery’s problem, generously interpreted, was an excess of virtue. Although he was ambitious and self-important, these qualities could not save him, for he directed them exclusively towards the achievement of the public good. Honest, sincere and hardworking, he bore himself like a man entrusted with an important message for the world. In his hands, a letter ...”

“... of a Vedanta Society of Southern California. Each of these works, of which A Single Man, where the self changes throughout the course of the day, is perhaps the most impressive, represents a step closer to the great and final goal of the religion of Isherwood’s adoption, the goal of disappearance. My Guru and his Disciple is another move closer to the ...”

“... is in doubt: it is his intention. The book appears to have started out as Chapter Four, which is a self-contained essay about metaphor and mental imagery: most of it has appeared previously in the British Journal of Aesthetics. Part of the theory is derived, unacknowledged, from Saussure, but with the more celebrated, if debatable parts of the Saussurean ...”

“... achievements. And these particular achievements are not just some of the funniest or even more self-aware of films. They are also a genre, and are about something. They are about marriage. More exactly, Cavell suggests, they are about remarriage. But marriage ‘is the central social image of human change’. And remarriage shows why such change ‘is and ...”

“... fact, a very substantial subject. Birthstone is doing, miles away, a similar job – that of the self-contained novel creating its own reality. It starts, banally enough, on a coach tour of Cornwall, but soon reveals, in the mind of the narrator, a modern vein of fantasy. Cornwall provides some of the details – to do with the tourist attraction of crawling ...”