“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gravy train student politics is. The Kinnockian Labour Party, they argue, became in effect self-recruiting: a Party dominated by professional politicians chose its allies and successors from organisations dominated by budding professional politicians. It is a pity Heffernan and Marqusee do not acknowledge what a long and distinguished pedigree this ...”

“... in 1990, the American historian Paul Breines argues that a significant change took place in the self-image of the American Jew after 1967. Breines examined films, books and magazines in which American Jews had traditionally portrayed themselves as mild, bookish and wise human beings, not given to retaliation or unprovoked violence. After 1967 the Jewish ...”

“... as they lived within their means) a mark of their benevolence; far from indicating an acquisitive self-interest indifferent to the interest of the nation at large, it provided the opportunity to increase the sum of happiness in the nation by increasing the number of those in employment. This Hogarth believed that as Britain became richer by commerce, it would ...”

“... honestly stated, were narrowly commercial. They were in it for the profit, and save in moments of self-inflation (rather few in Belgium, as it happens), have been little inclined to prate about their civilising mission. Their Congo state and colony paid a grim price for this single-minded interest in profit, and its successor, Zaire, still pays this ...”

“... victor of Kronstadt. All of them – Trotsky via political defeat – came to hate bureaucracies, self-serving oligarchies, shameless proponents of raison d’état. All of them – the anarchists by conviction, Trotsky and Thompson by experience of Stalin and the Cold War respectively – concluded that state bureaucracies, regardless of their ideological ...”

“... and ‘the West’. Ignorance here co-exists only too well with a sort of cultural masochism or self-hatred, where no robust critique of any other religion is possible lest it remind us of the ‘colonial’.Yet within weeks of the original fatwah (now just past its fifth infamous anniversary), and increasingly over the past year or two, the whole grand ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is the sort of book that attracts descriptions like ‘metafiction’, ‘fabulation’ and ‘self-referential’ – words that came into vogue at the same time as ‘ego-trip’. Plausibility is not attempted. None of the tales told are any good. They break off in confusion. They smell of midnight oil, not of improvisation. Two of them are in ...”