“... Shakespeare 20th-century ‘relevance’. Next man up is Stanley Fish, author of Surprised by Sin, Self-Consuming Artefacts and Is there a text in this class? Fish is a resilient veteran of many tumbles in such tourneys, and he seems to thrive on them, but because he is engaged on a scholarly patch that Dame Helen has made peculiarly her own (the prose of ...”

“... letter to the Times focused on the way this artful rogue weaved potted criminology into his self-exoneration. In the Sutcliffe case, the public, widely welcomed a verdict of criminal responsibility and appeared to get some amusement from the judicial humiliation of the psychiatrists who sought to portray him as the hapless victim of his own ...”

“... work, Towards the Great Civilisation, Radji could spot the Chalfont-Kim Il Sung shoot-self-in-foot syndrome and hastened to Ashraf’s side. He produces some pretty strong arguments against doing the book, but not enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the surface, perhaps, but profoundly significant when viewed from the standpoints of male self-identity and of national self-image. There is no doubt that the hair-cutting order drove many communities that might have surrendered peacefully into open and usually fatal resistance to the newly appointed magistrates of ...”

“... evolution that lasted half a century, railway stations became, both in grandiloquent and in self-effacing modes, the characteristic public buildings of the age, expressing that mélange of optimism, fancy and thoroughness so dissimilar from our own climate of feeling. What better venue than the Gare d’Orsay for the museum of the 19th century which has ...”

“... if they think the money can be better spent on other forms of advertising – in short, wholly self-interested. No sponsor backs adventurousness, with the risk of failure: a good Arts Council is one that is willing to do exactly that. However, Rees-Mogg, who insists that he is not political, believes that subsidy ‘weakens the sinews of ...”

“... face. Breaking this locution out into an upper-case ‘Other’ introduces an opposition between self and Other cherished by literary theorists but alien to the dramatic exigencies of this moment of dialogue. Earlier, speaking of the Transjordanian tribes, Havrelock writes: ‘They pledge obedience to Joshua as long as “Yahweh your God [her italics] is ...”

“... We go out on a tribute to Trotsky: ‘In the rush of confession, revision, repudiation, self-advancement and mere ageing that has overtaken the New York crowd, the idea of the fearless unpublished, unimpressed and uncompromised intelligence has taken rather a beating. That is why, long after Trotskyism has become irrelevant, the admonishing figure ...”

“... police sirens. In Saundersland even a serial child rapist is endowed with a crudely noble set of self-conceptions, if only to be a more worthy foil to his repressed teenage hero and dreamy damsel in distress. The title story is a similarly straight tale of heroism, this time doubled: a near-suicidal man with cancer saves a boy from drowning in a frozen ...”

“... irreparably stained by her old life, she abandons her throne for a convent, and then swoons into a self-willed, shame-ridden death. Just as the princely father noticed a purity of spirit in the girl from the city’s underbelly, we, or at least the media-makers who cater to our guilty interests, saw a brand of charm in Jade. She had the quality which most ...”

“... going to pretend to have read it all – I have a PhD in 19th-century British history, and some self-respect. It is a criminally bad book. But I doubt that my or anyone else’s saying so will make much difference to anything. Trevor-Roper was fascinated and amused by Robert Peters, but also spent a great deal of time and energy informing susceptible ...”

“... Fortysomething Cath, Australian, veteran of the barricades, self-described ‘bedrock feminist’ and ‘unreconstructed left-winger’, works for a down-town investment bank. Her much-loved husband, twenty-five years older, has Alzheimer’s, and for the first time in her life the free-spirit, freelance travel writer understands the need for real money ...”

“... the idealisation of little girls in Victorian culture is an attempt to repossess the remembered self rather than a wish for sexual possession of the other. Though Robson concedes that elements of sexual exploitation are present in all this, she moves away from the assumption that repressed sexuality was a dominant impulse in Victorian culture, and one which ...”

“... outsider. Basara has here defined the most fundamental and powerful of fictional engines – the self-observing observer, riddled by doubt. But he also has a problem, a problem he’s too committed to avoid: his particular amalgam of fictive loners has nothing really to rail against; unlike the others, he is created not by his situation but by authorial ...”