“... existing in 1948, and was reborn on 15 November 1988, the second a country that began its public self-destruction in April 1975, and has not stopped. In both polities there are and have been people whose national identity is threatened with extinction (the former) or with daily dissolution (the latter). In such societies the novel is both a risky and a ...”

“... sexual unease is one of the dominant themes of Goodbye to All That, a book that charts as self-consciously as, say, To the Lighthouse, the transition from Victorianism to modernity. Given his period and class, Graves’s arrested development sounds standard enough, but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ...”

“... likely to talk than his brother was. And the whole scene betrays an intense cultural delight in self-control, impassivity, grinning in the face of torture. But how did this sort of thing work through to a rank-and-file member of a Viking army (or come to that to a ‘royal Scandinavian general’, to use James’s phrase for the sons of Ragnar ...”

“... the end more of a failure than it is a triumph. But in the face of the spiteful scorn of the more self-consciously temperate members of the academy, it is in many ways a magnificent – even an enviable – failure. Like Rousseau, Unger thinks well of the potentialities of virtually every human being (at least at some stage in their lives), but poorly of ...”

“... larger-than-life, and to keep caste as caviare to the general. This applies just as much to the self-confessed puritans of the genre (Gluck, Wagner, Birtwistle) as to the unapologetic sensualists (Handel, the Italians, Strauss): perhaps only Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande has successfully transcended this fundamental crudity of impact. In the period ...”

“... philosophy books or books by Ruskin – by giving them Latin titles. It was the same unaffected self-confidence, combined with chronic insomnia and an incapacity for lazing around, that enabled Collingwood to sustain a part-time career as an archaeologist. He found it a relief from the idiocies of philosophy, and his publications, both popular and ...”

“... which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question. This was partly because the rise of manufacturing towns mocked the roast beef and Plymouth Hoe images of the ‘olden ...”

“... of some international problem. With some passion, extensive citation of material, and a somewhat self-regarding manner, such books made it apparent that there was a great deal in the way of conspiracy and intrigue that ought to be told. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a great practitioner of the art in the last century and in this short, sparkling and committed ...”

“... ships?) picks itself out as a conscious ironic hollowness, and signals a particular kind of verbal self-attention. Beckett is great in his suspicion of and pleasure in the once eloquent, his sentences so often digging up and putting on display the glint of an excommonplace. But few other writers have found a seriousness to go with the pleasure of this register ...”

“... one big and fat and ugly ... I’m not too clear about the other two.’ This is Adams’s stab at self-consciousness. What none of the characters talk about or seem to have read is Mary McCarthy’s The Group, although they do use the word ‘group’ in inverted commas, as if they thought it had a special meaning, or a secret life. Adams is not in ...”

“... Road. At the preliminary dinner with his co-panellists, he drinks too much, enamoured of this self-important world in which ignorant opinions are exchanged to choruses of approval. But as the arc-lights go up and the experts take their places, veterans dispense with deference, leaving Dyson to platitudes of ‘absolute fascination’. The alternative to ...”

“... monograph, ‘bewildering, preposterous, hilarious and moving’. A life, most certainly, that no self-respecting servant would be seen dead living. Mallarmé also said of him: ‘The word “infinite” can only be proffered worthily by a young man looking like Louis XIII, wearing furs and with fair hair.’ Villiers, A.W. Raitt tells us, ‘changed the ...”

“... that might be said to constitute an unacknowledged philosophy – there was a reluctance to extend self-consciousness in that direction. Criticism, it was thought, should remain auxiliary. If it intended to raise the question of its universal or principled basis, it might apply to Philosophy, not to Literature, for its academic entrée. It is certainly unusual ...”

“... the two things were co-extensive. Like one of those periods in Chinese history when Confucian self-discipline and Taoist impulsiveness nourished each other, Montale’s inner life was both naively fruitful and sophisticatedly self-aware. It makes him great fun to read, as if the smartest man in the world were a friend ...”

“... of existence: after killing the swan in an excess of naturally unreflective, predatorially self-assertive energy (Wahn, in Wagner’s Schopenhauerean sense), Parsifal’s moral growth begins (like Brünnhilde’s) in compassionate identification. In Syberberg’s Act Two, when Parsifal kisses Kundry and identifies with Amfortas’s suffering, the ...”