“... of unquarried marble and ‘plane-tree-dimmed. ... hill villages’. But Clampitt’s dry self-mockery usually manages to disinfect illusion. And in ‘Babel aboard the Hellas International Express’ she catches rather nicely the sprawling placelessness of travel, a fallen cosmopolitan gabble along the Songlines, as she rattles from Salonika ...”

“... for Gordimer, essentially a matter of representation. In the process, what she calls ‘creative self-absorption’ must always be checked by ‘conscionable awareness’. Coetzee, however, doubts that the sort of literal reflection offered by Gordimer and writers like her tells us anything more real, or more truthful, than a more obviously imaginative ...”

“... Her dashing derivative manner is hardly more than the function of a permanent hopeful high self-consciousness. But its falsity, though innocent, is unpromising: so much so that there is a curiously strong relief when at moments the Sandra style breaks down, and another voice – though still not the novelist’s – makes itself heard. Invariably this ...”

“... and he wants exclusive physical love. One thing they do agree about: ‘I’m not going to be self-sacrificing,’ she says. Nor will he be, as he showed in Part One. There is an important consequence of this. If you are not going to be self-sacrificing and others aren’t either, then the condition of life with people ...”

“... of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine and Cobbett are left out of the story. The land, England within its ‘natural’ boundaries, is ultimately the key to everything. Rupert Brooke did not suppose that some far corner of a foreign field would be for ...”

“... the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was ...”

“... to these heroes, and the ostensible nonchalance of his tone is partly a mimicry of their self-promoting unconcern. An abundant war-literature recording persons who would once have belonged to the class of unsung heroes has come into existence since Byron’s time, neutralising part of his complaint. The common soldier’s point of view is well ...”

“... letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear that Lee is really talking to herself: I don’t know quite what to do for the best. Shut up and take the consequences, sit tight on the safety valve, ease things a little by small squeals that humiliate ...”

“... he added, to view ‘Scots abroad as ambitious and successful and the Scots at home as self paralysed’. No such paralysis for Lloyd, who did well down south and further afield, editing Time Out and the New Statesman and working for the Financial Times as Labour editor, Eastern Europe editor and Moscow bureau chief. With the EU – ‘the other ...”

“... emigration’. So it was that long after the war an aristocratic Wehrmacht clung to the self-serving myth that the crimes and excesses of the SS had nothing to do with them or their mission. Bora’s own excuse is also a familiar one:My aggressiveness … is a reaction. Against the wrongs done to our Fatherland after the Great War, against those ...”

“... is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict.’ That was later echoed by Churchill. In 1937 he met Jabotinsky, and took up his opposition to a second partition of Palestine into Jewish and ...”

“... Liberal peoples, who are naturally indifferent to imperial glory, can justly wage wars of self-defence on ‘outlaw’ states. The synergy between the aims of the US State Department, human rights advocates and military humanists grew more intense after 9/11. Philip Bobbitt, counsellor to several American administrations, and muse to Blair and ...”

“... Lev was disgusted with himself every time he had sex. All too easily he transferred his self-loathing to the object of his lust. Women were filthy. Yearning for purity, he whored compulsively. He tried to be good, helping the peasants on his country estate, even running a school for them, but in no time at all he would be chasing women again. Even ...”

“... former collaborators and intimates alike. Given access to notebooks which reveal ‘a staggering self-loathing and guilt’, Heilpern acknowledges that he is dealing with a man who threw his 16-year-old daughter out of his house, fired his secretary for being pregnant, wrote letters to Jill Bennett addressed to ‘Mrs Adolf Hitler, Pouffs’ Palace, 30 ...”

“... of the younger fans who have edited them, that he is not more famous and better regarded. In a self-defeating introduction to the Reader, Arturo Silva indignantly sets out the neglect suffered by his hero: ignored by ‘editors and bureaucrats’, unrecognised by the academic establishment, forced five times to rewrite a profile of Kurosawa for the New ...”