“... reports about the sins of the medical establishment, The American Way of Birth seems both tame and self-serving: ‘tame’ because the scandal is by now familiar, and ‘self-serving’ because it is used to validate one particular narrative of childbirth – that of Mitford herself. Her book begins with an account of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... To limn the details of my situation I’ll reach into my past, adopt the system     Of self-portrayal – I know, no innovation –     Yet still the true strange ground of most creation. You always thought that kindly diagnosis Begins by looking at the child’s neurosis, So I hope you’ll pay attention. I was born     In Cambridge; both ...”

“... he is well aware of the significance of ‘collective worth’ for the humiliated masses who seek self-esteem in denigrating others. In extreme cases, such as Germany after Versailles or much of the Arab world today living in the shadow of Western dominance and the weaponry, of proxies, a paranoid nationalism sees the entire outside world as a gigantic ...”

“... the classical style once proclaimed the independence of art, it has been reintroduced as a form of self-deprecation rather than self-assertion. The revivalist impulse common to fundamentalism and post-modernism is thus in neither case a simple return to the past, for in the aftermath of the modernist redistribution of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... worldly wisdom, but rather tries to employ modern philosophy against itself, proving it to be self-refuting. To mount his counter-attack Hamann relies on Hume, whose works he had discovered in London and whom he would later translate into German. (Kant eventually read Hume in this translation, thus giving Hamann an indirect role in developing the critical ...”

“... clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the screening and dispatches his most obsequious aide in search of a dictionary. The testimony ...”

“... how to pick a dead drop and how not to look like James Bond, Suvorov was posted to Vienna, to that self-contained section of the Soviet Embassy called the Residency, which is headed by a GRU major-general invariably called ‘the Navigator’. He, as we learn from Shevchenko, can occupy quite a humble place in the diplomatic hierarchy, but because he is ...”

“... more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today. He was shamelessly egotistic and his self-importance attracted readers to the theatrical excitements he publicised. In his autobiographical Ego books he was less candid than Hazlitt was, but then he risked imprisonment. James Harding reveals Agate as a reckless hunter after unlawful pleasures. It is ...”

“... a bra. Seymour Levin the ex-drunkard and Gregor Samsa the bug ingeniously embody acts of colossal self-travesty, affording both authors a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that was plainly the cornerstone of their staid comportment. With Malamud as with many writers, exuberant ...”

“... quote), there is something of envy of real poetry. Is Vansittart himself a frustrated poet, a poet self-miscast as a novelist? The ‘monster’ of this novel is the career diplomat Roger Kirkland, the ‘high sans peur’ without any feelings (even ill feelings), but with many appetites thus made disgusting. His function here is certainly as the focus of ...”

“... All have shat. Oh, and since our brilliance will strike mortals blind, Henceforth our imperial self will give audience only through screens And we shall never be seen.’ The counsellors bowed and trembled for their balls. They ordered to be engraved in stone on Mount Tai: ‘The Sovereign Emperor made decrees and edicts which all his subjects ...”