“... 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 ...”

“... not ‘consent to any abridgment of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honour and self-respect of the nation is involved.’ At stake was ‘the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without conceding her own impotency as a nation and making virtual surrender of her independent position ...”

“... was the classic 20th-century Mitteleuropean sensibility: deracinated, sophisticated, ambitious, self-doubting, hungry for experience, politically engaged, and racked by despair. Born into the comfortable if emotionally suffocating world of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie, he saw the world of his childhood destroyed, and was never again able to find ...”

“... of them. Merton’s first example – in retrospect a poignant one – of what he called ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ was a run on a bank: a rumour that a bank is about to fail causes depositors to seek to withdraw their funds, making what was actually a sound financial institution unsound. Alone among the commentators on LTCM, Dunbar notes Merton’s ...”

“... and Guinevere. There are storyettes about knights and foxes, and Paolo and Francesca, and a real self-parody of a framing story about a girl who fakes a set of male genitals with a tulip and two bulbs. There’s a recipe for Salsa di Pomodori (‘Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added ...”