“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his character. ‘For most of his life,’ Woodhouse writes, D’Annunzio’s sole concern was self-gratification and glory: to make hit existence as interesting and preferably as joyful as possible for himself, whatever the consequences for others; to create a work of art from his life and to immortalise it in words. There were, it is true, moments when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the matter of making money, the new monopolists and bureaucrats have shed embarrassment, shame and self-discipline. Everyone knows about ‘fat cats’ but few identify two recent sources of their fat – both innovations of the Thatcher years. The first is the ‘remuneration committee’, made up of non-executive directors, which, usually with the help of ...”

“... affection; she loved them with the open-hearted arrogance typical of many older, brighter, self-absorbed siblings, to whom it never occurs that their own affections might not be returned in kind.In 1934, Maeve’s father was appointed the Republic of lreland’s envoy to the United States, and the family moved to Washington, DC; four years later, he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been. But a polype could also be a cancerous tumour; and the notion of the LCS as a cancerous, self-replicating, uncontrollable growth, whose numbers ‘exceed the powers of probable computation’, is everywhere in the descriptions of the Society by ministers and crown lawyers. Two things about the Government’s attitude to the organisation of the LCS ...”

“... than anything I could achieve at school with words. There were no excuses, no justifications, no self-deprecations: it was less equivocal, more final. I took for a while to reading about chess, along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a ...”

“... already overcrowded and grimacing back row,’ but he is a survivor, possessed of a ‘wheedling, self-deprecatory manner’, which has ‘procured him a wide variety of jobs, extracted him from equally extensive misadventures’. ‘His movements,’ we learn, when the narrator, after many years of not seeing him, catches sight of Bagshaw on a railway ...”

“... death, had to be reprinted four times within the year. Outraged by what he saw as her malice, her self-serving and her inaccuracy, Boswell set instantly to work on his Life of Samuel Johnson, the defects in his own records of Johnson’s conversation supplied by a biographical imagination ‘strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether’. Mrs Thrale ...”