“... wants to write ‘industrial’. In its accumulation and discharge of facts and its measured if self-conscious uniformity of tone his oeuvre has almost the air of a collective production, as though a single polyp, immolating itself, had somehow created a whole reef. Of course, Frazer is far from the only positivistically-minded 19th-century savant to prompt ...”

“... back to explore the nature of the universe’) and Mary Lynn Broe (‘To discuss only Plath’s self-sufficient system of poetic devices – even her imaginatively textured combinations that move organically toward energy – is to indulge narcissistically a kind of contextualism with some blatant indifferences’). The militant feminists have raged against ...”

“... institutions to their Roman source, Haecker saw Virgil as the inner pulse in Europe’s sense of self and destiny. In a different but related vein, and with Dante as central intermediary, the scholarship of Curtius and the criticism of Eliot extended this argument for Virgilian paternity. Our landscapes at evening, our manifold intimation of ‘town and ...”

“... to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to be shot of the tedium of ‘covering’ it, but nobody quite ...”

“... example, the darkening in ambient light of the surface of a cheek as it curves away from you), self-shadow (the dark side of a half-moon) and cast shadow (a hand making a rabbit on the wall by lamplight), we are already some way to understanding the basis of the rules painting manuals offer – for instance that the shadow a figure casts on the ground will ...”

“... find him ‘iron-hard and indefatigable ... a devil for the rules’. Burdened by the law, by self-discipline, by introspection, by a classical education and upper-class mores, Adair shuts himself into the dark hut with his opposite, bog-Irish riff-raff itself, the man of violent instinct who gives off a rank animal smell. This is an old and well-worked ...”

“... politics during the Weimar period and his service under Hitler may have seen in Venator a defiant self-portrait. Thomas Nevin, in what might be an oblique reference to the passage, reminds them that there is a difference between literature and politics and that ‘the Autor, the anarch, is a Rousseauist construct, safeguard of an egoism that takes itself as ...”

“... poem Modern Love, for all its shrewd bravura, she presented as a typical piece of masculine self-extenuation.   In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be: passion spins the plot. We are betrayed by what is false within. The interesting thing about this famous climax in Meredith’s most notable poem is that it is not only in deadly earnest but ...”

“... he did not mention its crucial point: did these events really happen, or was the climactic one a self-induced fantasy, something that took place only in Mary’s mind? Kipling tells the story as if the wounded airman were real, and the reader, too, accepts it for a fact, but critics have pointed out that he is more likely to be a hallucination, and have ...”

“... his position in relation to those so erroneously assumed by others in that type of jerky, tightly self-observant prose favoured by philosophers. ‘I want to indicate the type of account I believe is appropriate to pictorial meaning. It is an account that runs counter to a number of views widely held today of what it is for a picture to have meaning ...”

“... and familiar (the meaning of memory, of nationhood and selfhood), the idiom entirely typical and self-regarding. England, England, in other words, is a book which not only poses questions about integrity and authenticity, but is itself something of a poser. This is, I’m sure, entirely by design: Julian Barnes is a writer who knows how to spot a fake. Last ...”

“... But he was clearly determined to give himself time to decide what to do next; he was remarkably self-reliant. He married young and distanced himself a little from his exigent family, living for a while in Chertsey and then moving to Devon, with frequent visits to the West of Ireland. Years later he moved his household to Ireland. One fate he shared with his ...”

“... several Rules discussions, and is to some extent a Rules critique. On my way, I noticed that self-help books are kept next to philosophy, and when you see them close together, you notice how very much they are about the same great themes: death (Coping with Bereavement by Hamish McIlwraith), angst (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers), the ...”

“... see-through functionaries of the plot. There’s a droll exchange marking one of these twinges of self-awareness in an early novel called Cherokee – named for the Forties song, not for the Native Americans as such – between the driver of a Deux-Chevaux and his captive passenger: ‘ “We could take you somewhere.” “That’s it,” said ...”

“... the city, airily treating it, along with the rest of collective behaviour, as part of a Newtonian self-equilibrating system. Thus the city was created and held together by each man going about his business of buying and selling, among other commodities, human labour, either his own or somebody else’s. There is, indeed, much truth in this notion, for, as ...”