“... 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 ...”

“... morphine addict) and he is broken emotionally and professionally too. He retreats into a shell of self-absorption and despair. To top it all, Fanny Ratcliff has died of a mysterious, debilitating illness. The outbreak of war finds Edward Haggard working miserably as a GP in Griffin Head, a fictional South Coast town. Then one day there walks into his surgery ...”

“... of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetics of ‘still extent’, of finding and growing, are related to his understanding that a self is never a self on its own (as he writes elsewhere, ‘To know the place you have to disturb it/With your touch’). Although he often dwells on the way things come together or come good, the activity or motion of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”