“... medicine satisfies an immature hankering to play the big guy, basking in glory, the apparent self-sacrifices involved assuaging feelings of guilt and providing ego-defence. The heroics of the operating-theatre or the ‘fire brigade’ drama of the emergency call gratify Boy’s Own Paper cravings for adventure, and above all the authority structures of ...”

“... or darkness of that term into the reader’s eyes, by showing how prejudiced, how quick to draw self-flattering conclusions, have been some interpretations by well-known critics of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The second chapter, labelled starkly enough ‘Anti-Semitism’, turns the argument back upon Eliot himself; and in so doing deals with ...”

“... the very few writers down under who could be fanciful by nature, without giving any impression of self-consciousness. But in fact realism in the usual sense was not what anyone produced, for Australian writing took everything for granted – the empty country, the dust, the trees, the urban scene above all – because taking things for granted is the stance ...”

“... Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in ...”

“... artistic director says, ‘Sir! You know this music better than you know your so-called self. Make every effort to breathe naturally and your voice will be buoyed-up as upon a great cushion, your voice will spring as upon a trampoline! Breathe from the very balls of you, sir! We want the bright, the focused, the ringing top. Mr Lucchesi! Remember ...”

“... of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves’. He believes that the proper method for historians today is the same as it has always been, at least since the 19th century, when the rules of ...”

“... intelligent exile, trying to tell the truth, and the portrait he paints of his own younger self is of someone who, like the wartime GIs, was oversexed and over here. You get the same impression in London. Whereas Naipaul, an Oxford graduate with plenty of friends in the bohemian world, is a man who feels detached from the English social scene, Theroux ...”

“... rule that the picturesque is based on someone else’s inconvenience. Harar is a walled city, self-contained. Though you are no longer required to leave your spear at the city gates, you are still very much an outsider here. Only two Europeans have made any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard ...”

“... very difficult to believe one would wish to trade the blankness of death for living agony. Even self-confessed masochists are clear that the pain they want is the pain of their choosing, at the time of their choosing and with the sadist of their choosing, not an attack of toothache or appendicitis. Yet masochism in some more general form must be implicated ...”

“... blurb. The translators assure us of Kiyosawa Kiyoshi’s ‘meticulous attention to detail, the self-revealing thoughtfulness of his reflections, and the acuity of his observation’. The photograph on the cover shows him unprepared for this cascade of compliments, sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of ...”

“... of January 1906. In Volume Two of the diary Beatrice had already escaped from the neurotic self-analysis and sense of guilt which had characterised the first instalment; now in Volume Three we are aware of a confident, outgoing, independent-minded and very sociable woman approaching her fifties. In these entries, even before the defeat of the Balfour ...”

“... proudly to their grannies, ex-husbands, and the like. These sensitives were now exposed as shoddy self-deluders. Auden understood about the real, the hidden and depressed, readership for poetry: these poets of 1969 were even more hidden, more depressed and very likely ate in even nastier cafeterias than the types Auden had in mind. They had probably never ...”

“... usual sense of sin and sexual guilt. On a working holiday in France with a husband whom she finds self-absorbed and unsympathetic, she is planning to break the news to him at any moment that she is leaving him for her lover in California. But Alex, as the book opens, runs straight into a disastrous accident: a motorboat rams him head-on while he is ...”

“... are familiar to excess with its traits of impatience and hysteria, arbitrariness and that heedless self-assertion which goes under the mystifying name of ‘will power’, to which is added a strong does of self-pity: ‘He says that the weeks since 20 July [1944] have been the worst of his life. He has fought and won a ...”

“... impression is not of a man driven to testify but of a practised, cunning and profoundly self-conscious artist. The stories are always readable but this is often achieved by mere literary skill and one feels cheated rather than enriched at the end. There are several reasons for this disparity. One is the influence of Hemingway and Lardner. The faux ...”