“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When Worsthorne writes of being taken up by Irving Kristol at Encounter in the mid-Fifties, his self-deprecation deserts him as he recalls the lift this gave to his clubland standing: Unquestionably the value of my shares on the stock exchange of journalistic reputations had begun to catch up with Henry’s and John’s [Fairlie and Raymond] if not ...”

“... Alderman is a member of the community he describes and his book can be read as a collective self-portrait – presented from an inward-looking, religiously Orthodox, politically conservative and rather philistine perspective. Modern British Jewry has little to say about anti-semitism or assimilation, both of which, without distinction, it sees merely as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... set of the head. After a little while something else occurs: the splitting-off of a protoplasmic self that insinuates itself into every part of the flat. Like smoke, it wisps into corners and under sofas, investigating places that are too awkward for the body to go, and which never get dusted. It’s almost like a dance, a floating ...”

“... today.* Is he a gay poet, or a poet who is gay? ‘At times,’ he says, ‘I do think of my-self as writing for a gay audience.’ However, he adds: ‘I don’t usually think very precisely about the matter of audience; I doubt if many writers do, unless they are deliberately writing for a specialised audience, like writing boys’ adventure ...”

“... as elsewhere, seized on the ‘play of signifiers’ as warrant for a carnivalesque celebration of self-reflexive critical ingenuity, with Hartman imitating this hermeneutic dance on more leaden feet; on the other side, the dour de Man conceived Deconstruction, in Parrinder’s apt words, ‘as a twilight consciousness rather than a brilliant new dawn’; and ...”