“... with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts department pays a kind of homage to self-will. First defined in the 15th century by Leonardo Bruni as studies meant to ‘perfect and adorn a human being’, the humanities to this day sing their ability to turn out individuals capable of independent critical thought. At the same time, in order to ...”

“... my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice. Parts of this advice are inevitably self-advice, or self-justification (Flaubert’s hatred of all forms of exercise, gymnastics and sport was well known). Parts of it miss the mark: it would take more than work to keep Maupassant in good health, since the ...”

“... Victorian Society. Today Stedman Jones denies he was ever a true believer, describing his younger self as more a ‘crypto-Fabian’ than a Marxist. Even at his most radical, he was never an economic determinist; and he didn’t believe that Marxists should be satisfied with a history from below that brought previously excluded figures into the standard ...”

“... by her mother and brother (her father is dead), she can hardly be said to have such a thing as a self-image. She sees her reflection in the mirror in virtually non-human terms: ‘It’s a face like a piece of technology, and her two eyes are cursors blinking … It expresses everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing.’ Connell’s ...”

“... or realistic act of violence emerged in the wake of the First World War, and became increasingly self-referential during and immediately after the Second. But it’s not the puzzle-solving that makes me read detective novels, though it provides much of the narrative momentum. It’s something else, something related to melodrama, and reflected in the ...”

“... Dahlographies, the first unofficial one by Jeremy Treglown (who busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film ...”

“... cars, second homes, inflation and pollution. If people were running their own affairs in local self-sufficient communities, they would not need to commute long distances between home and work. Where everyone bicycles to work, who would need a second home? They would make a stronger case for their programme if, instead of blaming human greed, they were to ...”

“... they were of personal inspiration only in the paradoxical sense that the equivocal convulsions of self abnegation which made up their subject-matter appeared to be mirroring, in what the French term a mise en abyme, my own self-effacing attitude to language as the externalisation of an interiority. (Recently, one of my ...”

“... Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times defending Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and signed by all or most of those present). One had to pretend that ...”

“... of Comfort’s analysis of Thatcherism, far removed from Coster’s scrupulous probing, is most self-defeating when the author resorts to casual comparisons with Nazi Germany: the security service is the Gestapo, the Conservative Party Conference is ‘the Nuremberg Rally at Blackpool’. ‘They’re slowly imposing censorship, like the late ...”

“... he was in an absurd muddle about it. And it seems that he himself found more enjoyment in writing self-sending-up love-letters, supplemented by occasional moments of teasing dalliance with actresses and other devotees, than in doing what others would regard as the real thing. It is touching, therefore, that Love, outlawed by his metabiological programmes, had ...”

“... make themselves felt. Its subject, who was co-operation itself over public affairs and so self-critical as to be almost embarrassingly dismissive, clammed up over anything remotely to be described as ‘home life’, and the author’s other sources do not seem to have been of much use. Halcrow offers no explanation of this early instance of ...”

“... with innate ideas, thanks to Locke, equipped by Hartley with a psychology which permitted self-conscious development, and popularised by Priestley as a divinely ordained instrument of improvement, ‘pliable man’ stepped forward for inspection. No effort was spared to ensure his supersession of earlier, less malleable models. The dominance of ...”

“... shaped by the paradigms of the West or of Soviet socialist planning have not enhanced a sense of self-determination. This was seen to be a problem not just in Islamic countries but in ‘Third World’ countries generally, and it was this sort of problem that the Non-Aligned movement set out to address. The movement was not always successful and did not get ...”

“... whether or not they fall off. Any writer with DeLillo’s degree of fluency will inevitably risk self-indulgence: a writer who can do anything will sooner or later decide that anything is worth trying to do. To my mind, this self-indulgence shows up in what one might call the middle-period books, from Ratner’s Star ...”