“... 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 ...”

“... stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be ...”

“... fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who had us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what form he would return, sometimes mere months later. Dirty Mind in no way predicts Around the World in a Day ...”

“... designs on the play. It leans, that is to say, too heavily on time as a circumstance outside the self. Early in Cymbeline, Posthumus, exiled in Rome, is asked what he will do to help himself, and he answers that he plans nothing but to ‘abide the change of Time,/Quake in the present winters state, and wish/That warmer dayes would come’. The gentleness is ...”

“... subtle, gentle and sensitive, and he confesses himself happy to do without ‘misogynist satire, self-congratulation, smut’. He has left these to the other John, whose anthology is bold, noisy, rude, aggressive and full of itself, all of which things love can be, too, given half a chance. Neither editor is taking any chances, though. Fuller’s book, which ...”

“... is understood to include isolated acts of exhibitionism by a stranger, and sequels such as low self-esteem in adult life are accepted as caused by such events, it is not surprising, as the authors of Children’s Sexual Encounters with Adults point out, that an alarming picture of CSA can very readily be developed. The most serious omission from this book ...”

“... analytic) intelligence, that they don’t need to keep secrets from themselves. Or that self-consciousness doesn’t have to be crippling, opposed to an awareness of the world. Characters in Kundera acquire psychologies and histories, but they start out and continue to function chiefly as images, provocations: a man staring at a wall, or repeating a ...”

“... stories, about the inner life, about the value of the everyday world, and about views of self-expression stemming from the Romantic movement. The first story is about the shift, between Greek times and now, towards emphasising the inner life. Plato’s picture of the soul ruling the body does not make much of the inwardness of the soul. The modern ...”

“... drastically selective way. Its aim, as has often been noted, is more spiritual exhortation then self-revelation, or, more precisely, it is an exposition of the divine scheme with reference to a particular life-experience. As Henry Chadwick observes in the judicious introduction to his useful new English version, in explaining the role of the philosophic ...”

“... a now much scorned Enlightenment rationality. In this sense, a theory of the body runs the risk of self-contradiction, recovering for the mind just what was meant to deflate it; but if the body provides us with a little sensuous certitude in a progressively abstract world, it is also an elaborately coded affair, and so caters to the intellectual’s passion ...”

“... as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a potent ingredient of literary popularity. Everyone has something to look back on, and to be sorry for themselves about; and Connolly acted as a focal point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary ...”

“... colleague – as well as to a definite reluctance to rescue that colleague from his projected self-destruction. The story of murder in the quad – did Dover (then President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) drive the vulnerable historian Trevor Aston to his grave? – has already become part of this book’s mythology. But, as far as I can see, Dover ...”

“... beauty of a Tess of the d’Urbervilles: but Juanito’s fickle love for her combines the self-indulgence of a spoilt young man with a trace of the intellectual delusions of an Angel Clare. In making love to Fortunata he thinks he is making contact with the spirit of the pueblo, that raw, unpolished stone-quarry from which the marble of civilisation ...”

“... on revisiting his native town are thwarting or stifling. He sees his illness as an instinctive self-protective reaction: ‘When the troopship steamed up Southampton Water his existence entered a cul-de-sac, every prospect unthinkable, impossible to go back to a factory routine and a flat marriage. Something had to change, so his spirit had induced the ...”

“... on vending machines and paper-towel dispensers. These blessed forms locate the mind’s unending, self-delighting play. This is worth thinking about, though whether it adds up to a novel I do not know. I found myself repeating Dogberry’s phrase, ‘most tolerable and not to be endured’: meaning, I suppose, that I congratulate Mr Baker on a brilliant ...”