“... and bustle that you claim to want in the young. I am visible but not heard: distracted and nearly self- sufficient introverts, I and mine never meant any trouble. We hide our eggs; we work the third shift half the time, and give your cleaners the harmless slip even before they know it … But now I think I’ve figured out what bugs you. We have seen you ...”

“... I left the protectionof my plan & mythinking. I let my selfgo. Is this hope Ithought. Light fled.We have a worldto lose I thought.Summer fled. Thewaters rose. How do I organisemyself now. How do Ifind sufficientignorance. How do Inot summariseanything. Is this mystery,this deceptively complexlack of design. No sumtowards which to strive. No general truth ...”

“... municipal baths in another town and glance across the blue-grey of the park to where the better self I meant to be glides quietly, length by length, to his own ...”

“... the Lady’s Tower aren’t quite rare enough to acquire significant market value, much like the self-taught experts in autobrecciation and exfoliation weathering who work their way to the surface of the Coastal Path at the close of a hard winter. Amateur geologists, rockhounds, and collectors may be distinguished by commitments to task-specific ...”

“... rules of newspaper publishing. The Magazine’s reputation on the newspaper for being frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, using acres of space on what appeared to be self-indulgence and money-wasting, revolved around Francis, the éminence grise. When Don McCullin and I came back from Vietnam in 1972, McCullin’s pictures ...”

“... level from abstract theoretical propositions to concrete political instances. He is candid and self-revealing in a manner free from rancour and petty self-exoneration. This does not, of course, mean that he is humble or reticent about his own role, but there is a robust integrity to his account which makes it ...”

“... wistful conservatism                             an immense load Of self-neutralising moral and social qualities, Above all, Circumspection. That assault on the ‘English ethos’ comes from one of its most vehement and defiant opponents, Hugh MacDiarmid. In the preface to his last published collection, Direadh (1974), he ...”

“... in the mixed mode of writing about the moral life of the local community. Hoggart recognises (self-knowledge is his strong suit, often played in this book) that he shares with Cobbett ‘a touch of driven puritanism and a special hatred of ... the incivilities of presumed status’, but the greater warmth of fellow-feeling is reserved for Sturt, ‘a ...”

“... savantes if we want to. Kristeva is confessing to pedantry, and engagingly persisting in it. The self-consciousness, indeed the bravery of this move becomes clear if we persist with her book. One section is called ‘Losing Impatience’ – the way one loses one’s patience. She mounts a brilliant defence of the pedantic and pretentious Bloch, a ...”

“... and brilliant but personal generalisations, Garnsey and Saller aim at a more rigorous and self-conscious method, and so at general views which shall be objective and command the respect of the reader with some sociological sophistication. The difference in style is remarkable, and it accompanies and in part dictates the content. Both the other books ...”

“... most famously over the details of Madame Bovary, have made him an exemplary writer for other self-conscious writers, and this unlikely simile is quoted in a recent work testifying to that detailed interest: Julian Barnes in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) made a clever novel out of a preoccupation with the minutiae of Flaubert’s life, inventing a ...”

“... building up a network of friends, and a dependency on outside forces. Bahuns grow to adulthood ‘self-righteous but without an ability to be self-critical’. Much of this picture of relaxed child-rearing applies to most ethnic groups in Nepal. What differentiates Bahuns is their attitude to women. ‘Women in Nepal ...”

“... he understood, as a subtle puritan would need to, that permanent disappointment is also a mode of self-indulgence, and he never suggested that no poetry was good enough. What he said about R.P. Blackmur says, by reflection, a great deal about himself. Blackmur was interested, Davie thought, in ‘poetry, not poems: poetry, that is, considered not as the body ...”

“... of me? George Eliot and George Sand make me half inclined to cry over my poor little unappreciated self ... I would not buy their fame with their disadvantages, but I do feel very small, very obscure beside them, rather a failure all round, never securing any strong affection, and throughout my life, though I have had all the usual experiences of woman, never ...”

“... hyperinflation has, historically, been very small. Or perhaps it has only been thanks to the iron self-control of central bankers that we flabby moderates haven’t gone over the precipice? Iron self-control was also, as it happens, a great preoccupation of those Victorian writers on the upbringing of children who sought to ...”