“... years of the war,’ he writes, ‘de Valera’s attention was dominated by defence and national self-sufficiency. He stayed aloof from one of the few wars in modern times that really did involve the victory or the suppression of an evil creed, but he did so by adopting the same criteria of self-interest that governed the ...”

“... in its assumptions, economic and legal constraints and, finally, its power to awake loyalty and self-discipline, a noble family was then a major and possibly the decisive determinant of its members’ behaviour. The family of the future Choiseul had one characteristic, by no means unusual in his age, which was important for his career: its ramifications and ...”

“... and Barth’s friend, Ambrose Mensch. A rival candidate for the doctorate is Andrew Cook, ‘self-styled Laureate of Maryland’, an appalling versifier and a devout right-winger – though some suspect that these manifestations may be the ingenious cover of a dangerous revolutionary. Cook himself, of course, A.B. Cook VI, is one of the novel’s seven ...”

“... Most of Waugh’s routine ploys are on display here: the ingenuous parade of chumminess, the arch self-deprecation, the mock-antique diction that evokes a politer world than – he suggests – can be easily envisaged by those he’s being impolite to: in short, the apology that bites more nastily than the original offence. And then, to cap it all, the ...”

“... anything to welcome it. This is very odd. The impression left by Skinner’s Introduction is of a self-perpetuating cycle of talk about talk, of ‘changes of theoretical allegiance’ which have little to do with the advancement of learning but much to do with swings of intellectual fashion, self-conscious displays of ...”

“... this partly reflects the primitive agony of seeing the victim’s incomparable tragedy. The ‘self-regarding’ element in one’s grief at the death of a loved person is thus supplemented by an ‘other-regarding’ element concerning that loved person, even though the two elements may be extremely hard to disentangle. The death of somebody one did not ...”

“... only to themselves. The business of educating yourself out of this condition parallels the ethical self-training that all writers of fiction undergo. When, in Money, we meet the character Martin Amis, he seems, in his fully developed selfhood, a curiously stiff and priggish figure (‘I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I ...”

“... avant-garde, inchoate, and vitiated by what Virginia Woolf called ‘the damned egotistical self’. It was not just perversity which provoked her to court such charges. She set out to write a novel about ‘the startling things that are not important’, and to do so through the experiences of a woman who is evasive, assertive and contrary. She would ...”

“... inappropriate. Ruskin makes legends the way most people give excuses, but extraction of the self-contented skeleton traduces its effect in place. That one begins as a wisecrack, feeble but welcome in the circumstances. At least, it would have been a wisecrack had not Mr Harbison spoilt the symmetry between making legends and making excuses by changing ...”

“... Europe, on the United States and on the Soviet Union of this specifically British form of social self-indulgence – and thank God for Bevin, and for Nato. The expansiveness of the real Bevin is exhilarating, even in print. There is no trace here of foetid introversion. He saw foreigners as he did social classes: some of them were really all right, despite ...”

“... own five days in Holloway for assault, which only her close circle has known about till now; her self-doubting but deeply loving relationship with her daughter. Even more important, however, the Letters are packed with information, a good deal new, about her work. We hear at first hand of her attitude to fame – unwanted and never expected; to her audience ...”

“... be simple and not acting, it is almost impossible for a director to make simple folk refrain from self-conscious miming.’ We have seen this phenomenon, recently, on television: when the cameras are taken into a police station, the simpler policemen who think themselves clever show off and show themselves up. So it is with George Neville, trying to project ...”

“... to the couple sketching each other. In Ford, then, instead of O’Hara’s attempt to project the self into the poem, there’s a multiplying of self-reflexivities. Eva Salzman, like Ford, has a background that combines American and British influences – though in her case the American experiences came first. She was a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the author of the Waste-Books, an aphoristic, fragmentary and prodigiously sustained record of self-exploration. The role of all-purpose sage which Goethe filled for Erich Heller, as for so many prewar Central Europeans, was in Stern’s case reserved for Lichtenberg, to whose ‘doctrine of scattered occasions’ he devoted his longest monograph, and ...”