“... 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 ...”

“... was on the wane. Had he ever been truly valued ‘for himself’? But then, what was this self that he called his? And where did it belong, in Literature’s great call-up? Was he a left-over Pre-Raphaelite – a post Pre-Raphaelite? The grandson of Ford Madox Brown, he had spent his childhood trying to fathom the Rossettis. He was named after his ...”

“... Artaud and Kafka. The exploration of the text’s non-referential dimensions, its rhetorical self-consumption, was at the heart of the theoretical revolution. But many of the theoretical reading strategies developed at that time depended on a heuristic separation between the author’s life and the author’s work. The author was considered ...”

“... assuming other people’s voices it makes a set of rather dubious presumptions. The children’s self-naming, for example, is used to indicate not just their ethnic origin but also their social class and their intelligence. Thus, inevitably, the stupid young white English male who talks a kind of Estuary slob-speak gets called Wayne (‘all children called ...”