“... difficulty is compounded by her subject’s reluctance to reveal anything whatsoever of her inner self, whether in conversation, letters, diaries or autobiography. Her memoirs, Black Beech and Honeydew, should, she later remarked, have been called ‘Other People’, and her editor at Collins describes it as ‘pretty dull, largely because of her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to drop the ‘very lively and fiery things’ he had planned to say before he knew of his election. The main contribution ...”

“... is an enormously important person historically, more important than his own cheerfully truculent self-estimate. It is a cliché of left liberal conversation that the mildest reform politics is impeded by what is called Essex Man, the self-seeking, ...”

“... which limits women’s creativity to the domestic and maternal. The conflict between her wish for self-expression and her guilty resentment of her husband and child finally drives her mad. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was based on a pivotal experience in Gilman’s life. After the birth of her daughter Katherine, she had a severe post-partum depression which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a more general weakness in both books. Gilroy accepts the ‘radical contingency’ of black self-identity – the way in which acts of ethnic self-definition have in large part been shaped as responses to white racism. His account of that white racism, however, is thin, and over-dependent on 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... boy became an instant celebrity. We acknowledged Julie Burchill as the archetypal punk. She was self-regarding, bolshy and judgmental, and we were her proselytes. Every Friday in the New Musical Express she meted out punishment to ideological offenders, and came to represent for us the biological energy of the movement. At the beginning of Damaged ...”

“... her own, takes to drink. To save her from degradation and childlessness Stephen, in a great act of self-sacrifice, drives her into the arms of a man, who marries her. Those were the days of Boots Circulating Libraries, and The Well only needs one adjustment, though an important one, to make it a first-class Boots book. This, in fact, has always been the ...”

“... his relationship with Fanny Osbourne whom he was later to marry, run parallel to a process of self-discovery. Though he wanted to be a poet – and he has written poetry – Richard Holmes is inescapably a biographer: oblique, vicarious, elusive, passionately suspended between two lives as he gathers material for an autobiographical narrative through the ...”

“... fates because a society run by men dominated them either directly or by training them to think self-sacrifice a virtue. You would be able to swallow it, however, only because you would be unable to guess that art history is, in fact, full of misattributed and lost oeuvres (masc. as well as fem.), apprenticed sons, and pleas like the one entered recently in ...”

“... characteristic of one kind of Stead character, the monstrous and charming egotist, ‘boiling with self-respect’, who is superb and ridiculous in wishing only for the simplest things in life: things like love, happiness and scope for the free play of a benign will. The novel begins with and returns to, as The Man Who Loved Children did, something like a ...”