“... words, the images, the gestures were ugly, but often gripping. The behaviour – gobbing, pogoing, self-immolation and fighting onstage, drink, drugs, throwing up in public – was stupid and horrible. But the kids just lapped it up. Some of them followed their heroes into speed habits, drink habits, cynicism, burn out and an early grave. But an awful lot more ...”

“... and that the heart of it is ‘Jarrell’s continuous presence, in his sentences, as a performing self’: but whoever enjoyed Wilde, or read Disraeli, for the plot rather than the wit? If you approach the book with hostility it can be said to show Jarrell’s shortcomings as a human being, but it seems mean to think about short-comings when the end-result is ...”

“... the pleasures of the senses.’) He is also used throughout the book as a sounding-board for the self-conscious and idealistic aspirations which characterise the ivory towers of education as much as the classically isolated loci of detection. Subsequent novels experimented with quotations, both embedded and epigraphic, from Pope, Keats, Marcus Aurelius and ...”

“... social confidence ... It was hard to believe she would run away at such a critical time, and that self-esteem was more important than the future of the NYO.’ Not another word about Ivey Dickson, no hint that she was to change her mind and remain Musical Director for the next 18 years. The NYO I joined in 1968 was nominally Ivey Dickson’s, but judging by ...”

“... that the obstacle to implementing his social politics was the Liberal peerage: in fact, it was the self-satisfied middle classes, who had long had more power over the content of Liberalism than Chamberlain recognised, and who quickly became alarmed by his rhetoric and activity. At the Board of Trade, he antagonised laissez-faire shipowners and railway ...”

“... sentences too common in this collection: A practitioner of the meditation-in-verse and the self-presentational lyric, X attempts to infuse the commonplace with mystery and drama through conversational free verse and, on occasion, traditional forms. Does such a sentence about X’s procedures really tell us anything distinctive about this poet? Or is ...”

“... and madness.’ Flushed with hope, Chatterton launched himself with funds of inexperience and self-illusion. So he writes to his mother at the beginning of May: Good God! how superior is London to that despicable place Bristol! Here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities ... The poverty of authors is a common ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thinks. ‘I am afraid,’ says Levin, ‘that I have a very great deal to say.’ Courageous, self-willed and frantically energetic, Levin holds strong views which he enunciates with unambiguous force. He has some reason to be proud of his individuality. The things he says are mainly his, not somebody else’s. But he says them over and over. Even when ...”

“... is part of that situation. The reporting of anthropological fieldwork therefore calls for a self-conscious awareness on the part of the fieldworker of just how his/her prejudices, assumptions, cultural background, personal attachments etc influence the reportage. In the past, the typical ethnographic monograph has tended to exclude the ethnographer. The ...”

“... remarkable chapters in British working-class history: an avowedly Marxist movement of workers’ self-education, proletarian in both composition and leadership, which had endured for over twenty years and at its height had had over thirty thousand subscribing to its courses; and perhaps more extraordinary, given the allegedly empirical character of the ...”