“... dumped with and later adopted by prosperous maternal relations who pampered her. ‘Fryn’ (a self-made contraction of ‘Wynifried’ which seems to have been quite typical of her chatter) spent parts of her childhood with both parents in exotic and hopeless clerical postings abroad, and parts in what are described here as ‘dingy lodgings’, alone ...”

“... to feel. In this null condition, he does not distinguish between Doctor Ransome, the Brownlow who self-sacrificingly protects him, and the Fagin-like American seaman, Basie, who loots his way through the course of the novel. (Jim first encounters Basie ripping gold teeth from Chinese corpses.) Jim somehow survives internment, death marches and a final bizarre ...”

“... literary criticism on the ‘alternative terrain of scientific knowledge’; three since, self-canonised, he included his name in a list of major Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century. The Function of Criticism is a history of three centuries of English criticism in little more than a hundred pages. Its conceptual basis seems (not for the first ...”

“... bringing workingmen’s colleges and settlement houses to the underprivileged, and thence to the self-consciously virtuous, studiously unintellectual, pattern-cut products of the public schools. Alfred Tennyson’s Uncle Charles, convinced that his family was descended from the Medieval d’Eyncourts, devoted his patrimony to converting a modest Lincolnshire ...”

“... the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London. Year after year, at three-monthly intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty ...”

“... can no longer be considered as merely the products of a new ‘bourgeois realism’, reflecting self-satisfied pride of possession. It is often possible to show, not just that a single figure, seemingly based on the most direct observation of everyday life, has simply been copied from an engraving made by some other artist many years earlier, but also that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a game which involves obvious falsification on a large scale, it is also one which limbers up self-consciousness, in players and spectators alike, and enlarges the scope of sympathy and inquiry. It is the same with writers in the past. Since the study of English literature has intellectualised itself, not altogether unlaboriously, great writers whose ...”

“... servile and mechanic’ (to adopt the contemporary English terminology), calculating dealers, and self-interested artisans who wanted to be taken for something more exalted. The disinterested observer was free to dismiss from consideration most of the art produced since antiquity. It was the perceived absence of art worthy of elevated attention that prompted ...”

“... the demonstrations provoked by the Boer War, he wonders ‘whether England were losing some of her self-control under reverses, and, worst of all, whether in her victories she were becoming blatant.’ The blatancy of jingoism tells the gentleman how he differs, how he is. The gentleman sacrifices himself, the jingo cheers from a safe distance. The gentleman ...”

“... in the knowledge that until we are truly equal we will not be truly free’. It is that self-evident truth, says Hattersley, that his book seeks to demonstrate. (Subtle politician that he is, Hattersley refers us to Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband ‘for a full account of the conversation’ between him and Crosland. In fact, Mrs ...”