“... 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 ...”

“... inspiring human cause in European history, became merely a subordinate scene in the drama of his self-justification. This manipulation of the past is illuminated by the recovery of a poem dating from the mid-1790s, hitherto thought to exist only in a fragmentary state. Exactly two hundred years ago, in the summer of 1795, Wordsworth visited his university ...”

“... on it by its colonists, all the repression they continued to exert until quite recently, all that self-consciousness about being the refuge of ‘second-rate Europeans’, Australia can at last be interested primarily in its own othernesses, in what occurs in a culture that is as remote from the protocols of the mother country (not that the expression can now ...”

“... provoke ‘many just occasions of Duel’. Laughing at others, he warned, was a sign of prideful self-love. But as a political theorist who conceived of social life as a competition, Hobbes valued laughter for the same reason: it was a terrific index of disdain. All the ‘pleasure and jollity of the mind’ consisted in feeling superior to others, he wrote ...”

“... won a literary prize. (I’m not bitter.) (Am.) (Am not.) (Am.) (Am not.) (Am.)’ Neurotic and self-obsessed, Victoria makes cynical use of her relationships: ‘I make my living recasting the splurge of my friends’ emotional lives into the symmetry of fiction.’ So there are misgivings in her circle when she sends out an unusual invitation. Victoria ...”

“... or Vicesimus Knox’s many editions of Elegant Extracts, which claim that the selections are so self-evidently worthy as to be above controversy and the caprices of individual taste. At the same time, Price refuses to be limited by content-driven polemics, taking the anthology seriously as a genre that serves distinct publics. Equally attentive to the ...”

“... crisis is something that is arguably misdescribed as statutory underpinning of a voluntary system. Self-regulation cannot work without some measure of statutory underpinning; but what the House of Commons has just agreed to put on the statute book may not be the underpinning that is required. The parliamentary and press brouhaha has been about setting up an ...”

“... her father’s nastiness and his drinking; her mother’s death; her eating and purging and self-pity. Sometimes the repetition is suffocating, sometimes it just feels repetitious, and the depressive’s dark poetry begins to pall as yet another beautiful way to die is imagined: ‘I warmed my thawing fingers, poured myself more whisky, pictured the ...”

“... of widely held opinion, it fails to convince as drama. Desertion displays an academic’s self-consciousness about the story being told; and the sudden replacement of one cast of characters with another risks bucking the reader. But it is a well-judged form of self-consciousness, which ultimately pays dividends. The ...”