“... the steps by which the IRA might have conceded continuing partition: British recognition of Irish self-determination would allow the IRA in turn to recognise the self-determination of Ulster Protestants within Ireland.Was peace long delayed as a result of Protestant stubbornness? Unionist constipation should never be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ Between Theroux’s democratic self-effacement and Greene’s isolation of the self lie the dangers of half-measure: shoring up your unease at occupying centre-stage with plenty of solid book-learning, or affecting a complacent high profile of ...”

“... giant forms contend with each other chiefly over the issue of priority. Each aspires to be self-begotten by his own quickening power, to adapt words of Milton’s Satan that Bloom finds congenial. But this inevitably cannot be. Even at the apex of their ‘originality’, poets are rewriting – and being rewritten by – their ‘strong ...”

“... in Saigon) to include a sense of the wider world and its troubles in its hero’s search for self-knowledge. Burgess begins with a little metallurgy and quite a lot of history and mythology. A sword, Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the ...”

“... is concerned with discovering the truth about ‘them’ – objects outside the areas of his own self. Even if he is inquiring into the inmost psyche of patients, he must inevitably treat them as objects. Religion is primarily subjective. It is concerned with what never can be objectified: the ‘I’ in each one of us which as pure existence and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there anything you would wish to do differently if you had your life over again?, with the rueful self-stricture, ‘Use fewer semi-colons’; and the narrator of Beckett’s Watt is wrung to a small sudden flat remonstrance: ‘How hideous is the semi-colon.’)The conventions of Elizabethan printing are here charted and illustrated: with a single lunula, to ...”

“... takes her revenge with a spirited patter song, indignantly denouncing the King as a ‘conceited, self-indulgent libertine’ and seizing the occasion to inform him in – absentia – of ‘certain goings on around this place/That I wish to tell you I do not admire.’ I do not like polygamy Or even moderate bigamy (I realise That in your eyes That clearly ...”

“... the author’s books. If so, where to place Man’s Hope, Days of Wrath, and the post-Word War Two self-advertisements and hagiographies of General De Gaulle?’ For Lottman, the book is ‘a well-built narrative account of a revolutionary episode as it might have happened, with convincing personae who might reasonably have taken part in it’. Faint praise ...”