“... these novels so brilliantly funny – a lucid and ironic awareness of how pointless and manic and self-centred this talk is. Talk is a kind of doomed buffoonery, wearing funny clothes and taking tumbles because it doesn’t know how to get another job, or if there is another job, anywhere. The books are crowded with voices and short on punctuation, but are ...”

“... and after this well-known, much publicised and highly controversial royal liaison, she was a self-made career woman and a self-supporting working mother. For Mrs Jordan was the greatest comic actress of her day – adored by theatre-goers in London and the provinces; acclaimed by Hazlitt, Byron and Coleridge; cartooned ...”

“... and more a question of masquerade, what the authors call ‘female female impersonation’, a self-conscious performance of gender via costume (Millay’s girlish frocks, Moore’s cape and tricorn hat) and metaphor. They see this phenomenon more clearly in poetry than fiction: ‘since fiction by definition entails figuring, while poets have often tended ...”

“... thought that white children also should know about heroic African-Americans, it ends up with the self-fulfilling prediction that they will remain separated from their black contemporaries not just by money and life-chances but by a ‘difference of culture’. As Alan Ryan has pointed out, the people who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride ...”

“... More recently, the BBC precipitately withdrew a programme on Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. Self-censorship has replaced censorship from outside – where the issues at least tend to become known. Self-censorship operates in the dark. Self-censorship also signals a loss of political ...”

“... suavely hyped than his being grounded on the side of the sophisticated. His work is obsessively self-reflexive – ‘but am I Art?’ is its central question. Almost from the start he investigated how to make verse out of texts that (often explicitly) comment on themselves and on other texts. An early poem, ‘Plague Graves’, signals a debt to Hughes and ...”

“... up an important point too easily glossed over: that almost all of America’s dominant cultural self-perceptions have involved, if only implicitly, a contrast with Europe, for better or worse. In short, Vance is a sort of Tocqueville in reverse, who is ultimately truer to the Tocquevillean impulse than many of his more provincial American Studies ...”

“... because how others react will, of course, help decide the direction this whole enterprise of self-definition finally takes. Indeed this is true of almost every aspect of our relations with Japan. It is important that we think carefully before reacting to anything, so sensitive are their antennae to outside response. Should we search for disturbing ...”

“... it contains some lively and interesting passages, it has to be treated with caution as largely self-serving. All this is changing on direct orders from the top. About a year ago, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gromyko’s successor at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, assembled his entire staff to listen to a remarkable in-house address, lasting several hours, in which ...”

“... teacher to do everything. If you want your weans to get homework then give it to them your fucking self.    Gavin said: That actually sounds quite right-wing ye know.    Well it’s meant to be the fucking opposite and it is the fucking opposite.    Gavin nodded. Then:    Gavin gazed at him, then laughed briefly. He looked at Pat but Pat ...”

“... dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market ...”

“... had been chased away by the coming of the railway, money and commerce had displaced barter and self-sufficiency, and the inhabitants of the village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France ...”

“... of the Irish Home Rule Bill in 1893. The leading City institutions were singularly lacking in self-consciousness, and, then as now, far too busy doing business and earning commissions to worry much about public relations – and no honeypot the size of the Late Victorian City was ever without its flies. There was Barney Barnato, ...”

“... original purity to a society that thrives on a terribly debased version of it. The undertone of self-irony sometimes audible in his earlier work seems largely absent from this book. That is hardly surprising if one considers Bloom’s predecessors, the people who have sought to recover ancient religions that might either supplement or replace the ones we ...”

“... army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ‘easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection among soldiers for the colonel, not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection for the proprietor of ...”