“... had coexisted with the still sad music of humanity because both were to be perceived outside the self; but the internal voice of imagination that replaced the One Life was too loud – too dominant when in full song, and at other times too threatened – for the poet to do much listening. At these times he was indeed the ‘spectator ab extra’ that ...”

“... believes that the novel when confronted with the crisis of a death scene, resorts to various self-revealing tricks, tropes and devices. It sidesteps, elides or ‘transposes’ in order to cross the gap between garrulity and silence. Drowning is the form of death which most fascinates Stewart. This is the moment when, as folklore has it, the whole of ...”

“... the knife back, wanted only to cut him loose, to free him, to divide up his ‘stubborn mono-self’ into its original constituents. Yehuda dodged the blow, so that Naomi neither killed him nor freed him from himself, but merely grazed him with the knife, inscribing on his chest a lasting scar, ‘a hooked line like a reddish beak’. Two years later, as ...”

“... of violence’, meaning the allegedly erroneous supposition that political domination – purely self-serving and not the instrument of any preexisting economic class – could ever be the basis of a social system. It is ironic that an ideology which has helped to engender such a system should also deprive itself of any language in which to describe it.) His ...”

“... could be x-thousands, peppered with I’s’. As a compromise, we have this kebab: fatty scraps of self-revelation alternating with more substantial portions of fiction. Personal privacy is clearly a valued property of Barker’s and one which sometimes seems at odds with her mission as creative writer, let alone ...”

“... he finally produces an image of that kind of Englishman with which, as MacDiarmid saw, his later self can be at ease. It is not that Sherston was either A weak or a cowardly person. It is rather that his rebelliousness was only Superimposed on his profoundly English nature. Sherston’s Progress completes the image which first appeared in Memoirs of a ...”

“... both born commoners, crowned themselves Shah and ended up in exile, broken men – like that other self-crowned emperor, Napoleon. It seems now to have been forgotten that Reza Shah too was shunted around in exile, prevented from going where he wished to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza ...”

“... the Anti-Rightist campaign in the later part of 1957, and so forced Mao to claim in retrospective self-justification that his permissive Hundred Flowers policy had been no more than a trap to trick the regime’s enemies into exposing themselves. There is an article in the People’s Daily of 19 January this year attributing this 1957 campaign simply to ...”

“... for production values, something simpler and more sympathetic was beginning to stir. With more self-analysis, might David Selznick have made better movies? Ronald Haver asks no such question. He spends as little time exploring Selznick’s feelings as he does evaluating his films or examining why Gone with the Wind wowed Middle America. When he does refer ...”

“... was never slow to point this out: ‘A scholar who, like a Hindu ascetic immersed in self-contemplation, confines himself to his narrow field of specialisation, loses the larger view. The first requirement for the musicologist is to realise that the choice of studying other disciplines is governed not by his tastes and ideas alone, but by sheer ...”

“... embody the gentleman ideal, but Furbank is surely right in saying that consciousness, and their self-consciousness, prevent them by definition from doing so. In her excellent book Trollope and the Idea of the Gentleman Shirley Letwin showed how Trollope came closest of the Victorian authors to creating a picture of social morality based on that ideal, but ...”

“... easy to write a clear-sighted account of a gifted writer who is wily, opinionated and defensively self-descriptive: ‘This is a foot-off-the-ground novel,’ explains the narrator of Novel on Yellow Paper. ‘And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation.’ Jack Barbera and William McBrien ...”

“... her experience, knows it almost too well’; ‘One became almost too aware of Goffman’s “the self as performed character”.’ But then Hartman is in a difficult position, as a self and as a performing character. Matthew Arnold is still the enemy, yet Hartman is enough of a realist to know that there is at least some ...”

“... grappling with similar problems of communication between and within cultures. Mottahedeh is more self-conscious about his role as an interpreter than the other two, whose aims are more traditional, objectivist and discipline-based. Bakhash breaks his cover, though, in dedicating his book ‘to Roy [Mottahedeh?] ... and to my Iranian friends who loved the ...”

“... are thoroughly miserable on their own, even when they are pretending they are not. They have sad, self-deceiving affairs with others, and they stay apart, through pride and confusion and a little bad luck, for a whole year. The book follows them diligently, month by month, notes their dipping and swerving moods, the changing weather, the foliage, the ...”