“... 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 ...”

“... incompetent interpretation of a knotty passage in Nehemiah. Toward women she behaves with the self-assurance of Flora Poste at Cold Comfort Farm: but feminist fashions have changed and, whereas Flora Poste would pretty them up with bras and make-up, Donna Lee prefers scrubbed faces and the anti-sex-object style. The whole book resembles Cold Comfort Farm ...”

“... reader of Waugh might hope to find ... everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ‘insolent’ publisher; if there is a charge against Methuen it could only ...”

“... over a collection of dull, dim essays straining to articulate they know not what. The volume’s self-reflexive murkiness seems symptomatic of a more general malaise, and it is hard to remind oneself that it is simply the product of a small group of academics who have lost all touch with an audience and a society. It appears to express some deeper and more ...”

“... treated it more decently – as he does elsewhere in the novel. In 1964 John Fowles published ‘a self-portrait in ideas’ called The Aristos, of which he has said: ‘I hate to think of the awful pages of bad philosophy that would be in my novels if I hadn’t written that. ‘Perhaps time will find a similar use for Mantissa: at the moment, there’s ...”

“... that of Suckling or Herrick. Rochester’s is the voice of a man grown so familiar with his own self-destructiveness that it causes him no surprise. The very unstrained quality of his style makes his honesty the more chilling.’ The contribution by the editor of the volume begins with a consideration of the difficulty in distinguishing Rochester’s poems ...”