“... speak made me shudder. It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.’ Extraordinary ‘self-assurance’ was the quality picked out by Gladstone, when, as prime minister, he took time off to review Besant’s autobiography in 1893. He attributed it to the lack of a sense of sin, which enabled her to change direction without a qualm. For ...”

“... Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller – bring in gloomy reports on their reading, and the gloom is self-perpetuating, I agree, but I can’t see that a close reading of their books would find evidence of the glib levitation that Smith represents. There is, too, an ideological question. Critics who attack Eliot, Joyce, Yeats and Pound for the alleged ...”

“... Mrs Trilling has some sympathy for the black demonstrators – she admires their dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation ...”

“... reinforced by the resonant speaking voice from deep down in the diaphragm, confident and self-assured. When he spoke, his swift-moving lips, thick and red like two ripe fruits, evoked luxury and youthfulness; yet sometimes, thin as filaments of blood, they depicted death and carnage.’ In addition to the nature of the hankerings, the prose style ...”

“... hearing about for years?’ and then disappear under the hay again. It strikes me that Groucho’s self-interpretation of looking for a needle in a haystack undertakes to transfigure the coarse genre of farmer’s daughter gags into a search – almost hopeless, with just room for good spirits to operate – for a heart’s needle of pleasure somewhere within ...”

“... Pope’s outsider status, a product of his Roman Catholic faith and his physical handicap, some self-proclaimed New Historicists have slandered him as an apologist for such establishment vices as colonialism, which he explicitly and powerfully deplored. With such enemies, Pope did (and does) need friends. His correspondence records scores of relationships ...”

“... its innovative goals and practices, its productive methods, distribution systems and theoretical self-representations – all these things distinctly recall the situation of the early Modernist poetries which Jack Butler Yeats denounced. Indeed, what he had to say of those poets loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and ...”

“... repress a harsh answer, to confess to a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her ...”

“... Almost nonchalantly Verghese draws us towards devastating suffering. Denial is common: initial self-deception; then rebellion against those offering treatment; and an unashamed escalation in self-endangering behaviour. But Verghese’s bleak descriptions are tinged with humour. The pecker-pickling Texas truckers who ...”

“... capable of inordinate deceit and crafty manipulation. Yet the sense of being freed into a sexual self was a very powerful educational experience in Wharton’s life; without it one doubts whether she could have written The Age of Innocence (1920). Her major success, however, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905, well before the Fullerton affair. By the ...”

“... director at the time of Webb’s death in 1947: ‘Our founder was wiser than most and less self-regarding. Having set the School on its feet, he never attempted to impose his own views.’ But not through mere modesty. Webbian claims to superior expertise were in a sense institutionalised with the foundation of the School. Dahrendorf goes so far as to ...”

“... some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve. By the spring of 1804 the whole project was law. The fresh codification now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte’s ...”

“... great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or ...”

“... like to be as free as Westerners are, but are socially trained to think of freedom as regrettable self-indulgence. To take up such individual rights as free speech and free association can feel like putting one’s selfish desires before the interests of some group or of society as a whole. It is, as a high provincial official told Schell, ‘a clash between ...”

“... water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like ...”