“... as she did say more than once – that experiencing the genius almost made up for the booze, the self-harm, the harm to others. What she seemed to care about most in life was painting. She knew what hers gained from looking at Pollock’s and resisting. The space at the Barbican is curious, and can be deadening, but on this occasion it has been put to use in ...”

“... themselves possess.’ The bizarre possibility that Phillips intended to write an autobiographical self-help book rather than a novel may be the reason this book is so different in style from her previous fiction. Like Kate, Phillips married a doctor with two sons and became pregnant while caring for her mother through the terminal stages of cancer. MotherKind ...”

“... and civilians by turns contemptuous and reluctantly admiring, his motives a painful mixture of self-interest and dutiful rigour, Prior is Barker’s most compelling creation. He is a borderline figure whose brooding, antagonistic sessions with Rivers reveal a mind so at odds with itself that at times his dissociation leads to episodes in which he doesn’t ...”

“... admitted envy of his ease at performing in these sleep experiments; on performance as such; on self-hypnosis as such; and on Surrealism’s initiatory moves. Of course, we have no way of knowing if Conley is right, whatever our initial suspicions may have been. But would it not be an act of supergenius quality to be able to assume this state when that ...”

“... that human societies will grow up in intelligible phases as they mature towards a final full self-consciousness in which the conflicts of history are resolved; the evolution of reflective intelligence is to be the driving force. An offshoot of this philosophy is the Marxist theory of history, properly supplied with both direction and driving force, which ...”

“... in the Savoy Hotel to sit in a chair which immediately collapsed. Coward was his charming, urbane self in helping me to my feet, but the incident did not help to restore my self-confidence. I have never been flat on the floor in front of Gore but I have often felt that the happening was imminent. Who, one wonders, is ...”

“... Dr Wormell got to know Seeley’s ideas and patterns of thought intimately, but his more private self must have been hard to crack. He kept no diary and there is little record of his emotional history, or even the small beer of his social and professional activities. But there is enough to form a picture of an earnest, highly-strung and rather withdrawn ...”

“... and the economic power of the central as opposed to the subordinated peripheral regions become self-reinforcing. The central regions exercised their power through the market, where the periphery was subject to greater state and bureaucratic control. The effect of the Industrial Revolution was only to enhance the market power of the centre by creating the ...”

“... of whom normally stopped short of expulsion – but this on the whole was a contentedly self-regarding officer corps recruited mainly from the so-called public schools, entirely at one with their cult of ‘character’ and sportiness and with the ‘county’s’ cult of horsemanship (see especially the general on page 66 ‘whose admiration for ...”

“... they don’t. They go in one ear and go straight to the nervous system, eating away co-ordination, self-confidence and self-respect.’ Today’s referees have their decisions replayed and dissected long after the game has finished.Other sports seem to be faring better. Rugby’s TMO (Television Match Official) is the gold ...”

“... magic by showing him to have been a little less cheerful, generous and perceptive, a little more self-concerned and self-seeking, a little more pompous and irascible, than we know him to be from the marvellous fictional edifices he built. Winston did his honest best to make him look attractive. He almost succeeds. Whether ...”

“... what’s worrying you? ... There was a queer histrionic look in him, perhaps strain in him. Very self-assured outwardly. Inwardly lacerated by the taunt that he wrote too easily and deified satire; that’s my salvage from an autobiography of him – one of many, as if he were dissatisfied and must always draw and redraw his own picture ... so the inspirer ...”

“... and the 30th parallel’, whose inhabitants are both fiercely nationalistic and ‘abandoned, self-doubting’. The first half of the book is set in Efica, the second in the much more powerful country of Voorstand. These nations have been imagined in some detail: all the dates in the novel are given according to the Efican calendar (making it hard to tell ...”

“... studied, affected, textually pleasuring itself in its redundancy; and ditto the luxuriating self-interrogation. This sort of tone is not the main thing Castle means when she cites Edward Said in praise of ‘worldliness’, but it’s connected: ‘gay men,’ she mock-complains, ‘have always seemed to monopolise the wit-and-sophistication ...”

“... of my dearest wish.’ Her acceptance of his criticism is characteristic, combining disarming self-deprecation with guilt-shifting. She was always on a trapeze between humility, on the one hand, and gigantic conceit, ambition and self-deception, on the other. One entry reads: ‘I am utterly ...”