“... the implied contrast with an imagined ‘real’ intelligentsia has a long history in British self-definition. But even if any relatively distinctive pattern could be established here (scholarship on intellectuals in other European countries suggests no great distinctiveness is involved), there is no way to ‘read off’ political or other convictions ...”

“... The Elvis bazaar is surely the low parody of Lourdes. To the images of sickness and suffering and self-sacrifice, the proprietors of the Elvis pilgrimage add a frank and frantic sexuality. The ambiguity of ‘passion’, long suspected in icons like Bernini’s Santa Teresa, here finally bursts forth and goes to town (Memphis). The nuns of Elvis spend their ...”

“... this sensible way. Certainly, this is very different from Wittgenstein’s cautious argument that self-consciousness depends on consciousness of others, both expressed in a common language. But O’Shaughnessy is not trying to prove anything at this point. He simply wants to liberate his inquiry from the new scepticism about the internal world, and ...”

“... for the need to be recognised or honoured; when what at first was the joy of creation and self-realisation turns into an affliction; when, in Africa especially, the vocation of writing takes its revenge on those who have tasted the thrill of representing the drama of a vast, unwieldy and refractory continent – a drama of becoming. Chinua Achebe has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Christina Stead ‘resists the evil reductionism of our culture and never “totalises” the self (an ugly but useful word)’; ‘In great fiction the language is not only satisfying in itself, but it also fulfils larger purposes of design.’ This suggests that White is not a very natural critic, which matters little because he is so clearly a natural ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the last decade, in all the financial service industries: from a reliance on in formal modes of self-regulation, based on the recruitment of staff from a very narrow social stratum, to more bureaucratic and theoretically more accountable systems of external regulation, characterised by rather stricter surveillance and rules of membership. Partly as a result ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... energetic and dominating side, standing guard over a less confident but more creative inner self’ – is called Alice. E. Nesbit wanted to be in charge. She was manipulative, self-dramatising and alluring. In a series of South London homes – first poky, later rambling – she entertained. She liked to lay on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... appeal to a succession of potential wives (his love-letters display an unendearing combination of self-pity, arrogance and wounded dignity), Malone seems to have resembled less the generous, self-effacing playwright whom he called his ‘MASTER’ than the most earnest servant, self-lover ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... woman into one complicated misery after another. The ‘virtue’ to which she is attached is self-lacerating. ‘She remembered the maxim of her Philosopher, that it is better to be deceived by a thousand Rogues than to refuse one’s aid to a single person who truly deserves to be pitied. She felt herself very much consoled by this Reflection, and ...”

“... 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 ...”