“... bespeaks a certain good opinion of oneself, hope to catch him in a posture of arrogance or self-importance, but O’Brien is far too fly for that. So he appears to one and all as a sort of pirate battleship, mounting heavy guns but belonging to no Navy and dangerously liable to sink anything he comes across. He attracted the nickname ‘The ...”

“... trick, in which she appeals for help after she has derailed her chain with her own hands or self-inflicted a puncture. Foreign experience is also helpful in other ways. Meeting a migrant from Swat, she introduces herself as a friend of the late Wali. Trying to win over truculent Rastafarians, she produces photographs of herself in Ethiopia with Haile ...”

“... The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot ...”

“... in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his verse. All in all, nobody is nowadays likely to complain much if we speak of the Sitwells as curious ...”

“... it: these 1200 pages of Amis Letters are merely a ‘selection’, we are told). Instead of direct self-disclosure, we get yards of leering porn – mostly to do with what lesbian schoolgirls might, or should, get up to – and a certain amount of sexual note-comparing. The two young would-be shaggers routinely swap updates on this or that girlfriend ...”

“... activity has always been very much more fitful. Hence a certain amount of not unjustified self-congratulation in the Apostolic ranks, and hence the divergent reactions of observers. Lubenow and his subject seem at first glance an unlikely match. Lubenow is a political historian from New Jersey, and the author of two solid books on the Liberal Party ...”

“... they say. It is solving its social problems, and awaits the imminent return of some measure of self-government and respect. Why then should the planet’s most consistently stable and resourceful great city have generated so jittery an image? The answer seems to lie in a hidden equilibrium of forces that London has always been less able to articulate and ...”

“... Troy Book, composed during Henry V’s reign, were to advance the programme of Lancastrian self-representation set out by chroniclers such as Thomas Walsingham and the clerical author of the Deeds of Henry V, insistently reiterating the favoured themes of legitimacy, nationalism and orthodoxy. Yet for all their anxious loyalty, and the considerable ...”

“... men at table had for Cézanne, or the pleasure we take in the limited palette, calculated, self-referential brush-strokes and subtle asymmetry of Codde’s Young Man, is not to fall victim to an ahistorical taste for 19th-century art for art’s sake (whatever that may be): it is to acknowledge a historical situation. Although this art was produced at ...”

“... Prufrock’ was an act of great courage. Ackroyd will say of Eliot in 1920 that his pride and self-preservation ‘did lead Eliot to a most extraordinary caution in both private and public affairs’. Ackroyd speaks of Eliot as ‘a timid man’; he quotes with concurrence Virginia Woolf’s wishing in 1923 that Eliot had more ‘spunk’ in him, and ...”

“... essays makes no secret of its anger or its reckoning, but the praise part is pained irony, not self-pleasing sarcasm: ‘But no one else has presented it in such a lively, resourceful and energetic manner, so the best name one can find for it is the Kenner Smear.’ The second Joyce essay opens with a sentence which is exactly weighed and timed: ‘It is ...”

“... the letters do add a dimension to our reading of Hardy. He comes out so plainly as the tenacious, self-interested Dorset man of modest station, more or less self-educated, determined to keep his end up, intellectually and socially, though neither his ideas nor his social graces were exactly distinguished. What distinguished ...”

“... claim that the Holocaust had been tailored to the ‘true’ underlying preferences of Jews for self-destruction). But the sense in which utility is made observable by this method is a rather weak one. This could be seen as the result of unnecessarily restricting (to choice behaviour) the range of evidence that is relevant to establishing what people’s ...”

“... ends. The evidence which survives those long dead usually leaves their buried lives guarded by the self-composure of letters: this intelligent novelist, pursuing the intimacy of relations between inner and outer selves, works out from the psychological freedom of insight which is her privilege, to incorporate the formally-determined behaviour, the strict ...”

“... be separated from his distaste for the mores of ‘Western’ Jews, itself a part of that deeply self-destructive mode from which he fashioned some of his most memorable images and scenes. The manner in which the central characters of his stories – Gregor Samsa in ‘The Metamorphosis’, Josef K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle – are related to the ...”