“... and Hazlitt all this has gone out the window. At their hands the essay becomes an autonomous, a self-justifying genre; it is now literature. That is, it serves no ulterior purposes, performs no public function. Self-justifying means self-regarding. And where Charles Lamb is ...”

“... It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was alone; a sociable sell, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a ...”

“... meditative mill. What he aims to do is tell us the meaning of our times by placing them in a self-consciously Hebraic perspective. The Christians and (more especially) the Muslims have taken over the post-1989 act. Time, therefore, for the Jews to fight their own corner. Whet it comes to prophecy they can still take on the rest of the world. The result ...”

“... in them herself. So her lack of education was no great disadvantage, and for an autocratic and self-centred woman she was a remarkably good listener. She was, however, inordinately jealous. D’Alembert’s defection to the Lespinasse establishment was seen as an unforgivable act of perfidy: had she not won him membership of the Académie Française after ...”

“... piece of characterisation, both historically and psychologically plausible in his altruistic self-importance and rationalistic crankiness. Kellogg’s principles for ‘biologic living’ involved strict vegetarianism, teetotalism and sexual abstinence, combined with exercise, hydrotherapy, phototherapy and frequent colonic irrigation. None of the ...”

“... drinking, working, playing and the sheer ebullience of success, London remained all his life the self-made undergraduate, working his way through the college of manly experience and always ready for further deeds of initiation. His personality is far more sympathetic than Hemingway’s, though he has none of Hemingway’s unerring originality as a ...”

“... background accessible to the speaker it constrains; it is not an object of his or her critical self-consciousness; rather, it constitutes the field in which consciousness occurs, and therefore the productions of consciousness, and specifically speech, will always be political (that is, angled) in ways the speaker cannot know One might well wonder why we ...”

“... imitations, such as Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. The third passage, by now highly self-conscious, is the beginning of Katie Hickman’s A Trip to the Light Fantastic. Niña turns out to be a boa, and despite appearances this is not a novel but a travel book, running after magic in the reality of Mexico. Hickman’s excuse for this reversal of ...”

“... beginning saluted Israel’s ‘courage’ in granting Palestinians the right to extremely limited self-rule. (Even that is still far from realisation.) Why the victims of Israel’s policies of dispossession, occupation and repression should thank their persecutors for a grudging admission that they ‘exist’ is difficult to understand, although the ...”

“... up economically with other countries, the production of ‘thinking and informed people’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-discipline’. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of that ‘academic excellence’ we used to hear so much about. What is actually taught and achieved in maintained schools will be decided by ...”

“... rather than a builder-up of egos, her own included, which finds no favour with her. Her lack of self-love is striking in autobiography; towards the end, self-pity creeps in. But even that is part of her sensational boot-in honesty: she does not spare herself, deny unhappiness, or curry favour by displaying a socially ...”

“... how the rest of MacLean’s poetry is born out of war, out of the clash of warring elements of the self, and out of divided loyalties, as well as out of the heroic fight for the survival of his people’s language and culture. It is no accident that the last poem in this book, the recent ‘Screapadal’, is a meditation both on the clearance of Raasay in 1846 ...”

“... not having armed themselves’, as she puts it. Or for having been so obsessed with their sexual self-discovery that they simply failed to see what was happening beyond it. At the beginning of the book, Sara Maitland announces her search for ‘signs of hope and self-criticism’ to enlighten the Eighties, and praises the ...”

“... Lessard describes it all with unbridled, mystically tinged lyricism. Her book is overwritten, self-indulgent and humourless; cute, mawkish and pretentious by turns, but far from unreadable, and with some powerful and effective passages. Her insights can be strong, some of her descriptions are good, and her excesses are not due to naivety. For years she ...”

“... principal factor is the size and spread of the English language, which offers readers a delusive self-sufficiency. Why bother with anything else – apart from a handful of 19th-century French and Russian novelists, the only things that have ever really caught on – when there is so much to be read in English? Increasingly, it’s only English that ...”