“... want you to be. For women, not only women of the Third World, this is the most available form of self-preservation. The temporal form of the book is as intricately logical as electric wiring, moving not serially but in bundled threads between the area of darkness of the East and the often artificial light of America. From the electrical storm of ‘high ...”

“... the conventional utilitarian perspective of the age. ‘Utility, Power, Pain, Pleasure, Happiness, Self-interest, are all phrases to which any man may annex any meaning he pleases,’ he wrote in 1835. His identification of the implicit danger of tautology in the utilitarian account of human motivation was shrewd and pithy. ‘To say that when a man acts, he ...”

“... Less meat and dairy produce was being consumed per capita. The new diet, however, was not self-evidently less healthy and it certainly enabled a larger population to be supported. Ian Whyte, drawing on the researches of Houston and Cage as well as his own, demonstrates how apprenticeship, kirk sessions records and marriage registers can all be used to ...”

“... But what a strange complaint to make when one has come back from London to, of all places, Paris. Self-importance is an occupational hazard in writers – which is one of the reasons one would prefer any amount of Nancy Mitford’s so-called Roedean hoydenishness to the self-importance of some of her middle-class ...”

“... a much wider pattern of fourth and fifth-century Christian culture which based itself openly and self-consciously on traditional pagan models. Educated bishops delighted in their non-Christian learning; letters, sermons, witty table talk and even doctrinal tracts were all regarded as suitable vehicles for virtuoso displays of erudition. In over one hundred ...”

“... rented from Alison Lurie. When I had finished reading she asked anxiously: ‘Do you think it’s self-pitying?’ (It’s not, but it is heart-rending.) A few months later, in another rented house (East Hampton in August), she was furious with me for getting the pages of some later chapters mixed up while I was reading them. Janet loved the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... couple, is comic, but also dangerous: any of the four characters may, at any time, lose all self-possession. As Avram says: ‘It’s incredible. No one has thrown anything.’ In these early stories, the reader, safely out of range of hurled objects, contemplates characters who consider themselves masters of their feelings, but whose lives can be ...”

“... our way into Jordan. The check-list of forbidden photo-opportunities was well-known, and judicious self-censorship kept trouble at bay. It was much more frustrating when I wanted to film at a location I knew was uncontentious and, for reasons of pigheadedness, idleness or lunch-break, the men from the Ministry of Information refused to allow me out of the ...”

“... Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the lion himself. And 36 years still to come ...”

“... we will not be hearing much about ‘merely good chaps, or fairly good chaps’, nor about ‘self-restrained’ chaps, or ‘secretive’ chaps. And fair enough, we have to say: these are his memoirs, after all. But what then is left to tell? Luckily, Amis possesses a good memory for anecdotes, or so he says, and he is also not too choosy when it comes ...”

“... inspired by them. Of the two, Spence’s book is more ideographic and narrative, Gray’s the more self-consciously explanatory. Spence is telling a story, relying on a time-honoured alternation between pointillistic details and broad strokes, with no inclination to canvass multiple explanations of events he is relating. Reading Gray, one feels part of a ...”

“... had bought and prepared the ingredients. Still the pride was something – probably a good deal. Self-respect in one’s activities is shown to be what matters. One of the female interviewees used to like the jobs she’d always had, jobs ‘where you can keep your brains for your hobbies’, cleaning schools and lavatories or checking telephone ...”

“... expense than importing it from abroad would entail. It was part of the country’s drive for self-sufficiency. The result was a permanent fuel shortage. Although Albania now imports most of its oil with Western help, hundreds of oil derricks are still nodding away, pumping up oil that has no market. Rivers of crude just continue to flow, slowly seeping ...”

“... and Williams are better than the movies,’ O’Hara, unlike Ginsberg, couldn’t use the rolling self-importance of Whitman – any more than Keats could use the ‘egotistical sublime’ of Wordsworth. Like Keats, he rejected poetry that had ‘a palpable design’ on us. But he could learn from Williams’s relaxed intimacy with places and things; and he ...”