“... only industry to have commercialised the Occupation. There is a long tradition of journalists and self-styled historians arriving in the Islands in search of dirt on it – and being taken far more seriously than they deserved. A writer calling himself Peter Tombs came in the mid-Seventies, promising many of the same sensational revelations as Bunting, only ...”

“... victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough ...”

“... words as exact as those of the stones in the tower itself. Auden had a beady eye for the laxity of self-indulgence, even when, as occurs in Hardy’s poems, it is a part of their personal engagingness. ‘I never cared for life: life cared for me,’ writes Hardy, and Auden commented: ‘What – never? Come, come, Mr Hardy.’ The line of poetry and the ...”

“... of at least one blackmail attempt. ‘Please seize the event, however delicate the problem,’ the self-important Fullerton once advised another potential biographer of Wharton, ‘to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity.’ The advice is offensive, but it has to be conceded that the detailed documenting of the woman’s sexual awakening has ...”

“... be better understood, no less than does the power exercised in and by literature. Baudrillard’s self-promoting rhetoric only frustrates such efforts, as in his use of words like ‘real’ and ‘history’. Are we to assume that in some better world than ours ‘history’ and some concept of the ‘real’ existed in a pure state, uncontaminated by ...”

“... reader because all are meaning-constitutive. Not every reader will read these forms of the text self-consciously, however. Or take a more particular example. Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ was first published by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner in January 1817. The poem is placed in the immediate context of a long article dealing with political ...”

“... or a poem to others to read (which we all do all the time). It can also be a sophisticated and a self-conscious activity: to evaluate a passage entails forming an idea of what it is trying to achieve and working out in detail whether or not, and how, it achieves it. The reason why criticism is fun, and democratic, and subject to change, is that other people ...”

“... second time he went away, the mess he was fleeing was all too real.There was something wilfully self-destructive about the way Byron had got himself into it. He had a crippling tendency to passivity, happily giving way, for example, to Lady Melbourne – Caroline Lamb’s mother-in-law and Annabella Milbanke’s aunt – ‘the Spider’, doyenne of Whig ...”

“... the poet’s inability to leave his poems alone, compromises the authenticity, undoes the apparent self-evidence that was his object. Earlier text challenges later text, and intermediate versions compete with both. The question for 19th-century and modern editors has been which version of his work to prefer. No publisher could publish it all in all its ...”

“... artist Zhang Huan has become visible far beyond China. Such is the paradox of withdrawal and self-advancement for its belated avant-garde, and more generally in the late Nineties, for the country’s cultural élite. In Beijing’s dilapidated East Village, where urban bohemians live cheek by jowl with peasant farmers and other marginal groups, a small ...”

“... in the private sector. The received picture is therefore one of a volatile petty-bourgeoisie whose self-hate was projected onto a hatred of others. Hitler was the little man’s strong man. The Nazis and the petty-bourgeoisie seem to have been made for each other. Professional horse-sense suggests that it is only a matter of time before historians set out to ...”

“... genre of the public-school story, with references both to Greyfriars and to Stalky which show the self-consciousness of the enterprise. But, just as the cleverness of A Villa in France involved the central female character in overcoming the plot which had been laid for her, so An Open Prison turns the instruments of the narrator, a wise old ...”

“... philosophical tradition, as having overcome certain ways of thinking which were ‘mythic’ or ‘self-deceptive’ or ‘culture-bound’ (or whatever near-synonym of ‘irrational’ is then in fashion). ‘Reason’ is always being redefined in order to accommodate the irrationalists of the preceding generation. Heidegger and Derrida get called ...”

“... be achieved by examining men’s attitudes to God, nature, one another, and in particular their self-images as these are embodied in social institutions, especially in forms of language and of religious and artistic self-expression, connected in his mind with class conflict and social tension: these institutions provided ...”

“... whom we are abhorred.’ His conduct when deluded does not accord with this in any case somewhat self-contradictory precept, and the discrepancy can be read as a sign of his insanity: but it scarcely has the force of an apology for the hurts he inflicts. This passage could be thought to link the novel with a work of the same time, Shakespeare’s ...”