“... which is all beginning all beginning still yet if I wanted to put a date when this naked shivering self began to puzzle at print sound spokensound the wind in the reeds or a cry in the street I’d choose that room for a start the bangles the curtain rings – it’s my baby tuckoo tuckoo tuckoo it is not the tundish this is echt British except that’s always ...”

“... rarely found elsewhere. Unrequited resentment is the source of this propensity, not romantic self-indulgence or nostalgia standing in for nationhood. Since Walter Scott’s time the wound has been bandaged up in kitsch, of course. But the dressings have become so famously elaborate only because the cut went so deep. Will it ever be healed? Perhaps, but ...”

“... often in the works of Philip Larkin? And which of these two poets would you reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to hyphens, keen on using the word mother? Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent browsing in the realms of the Concordance. It so happens that both Larkin and Eliot have lately had their ...”

“... and so must churn out images directed both inwards and outwards with inventive abandon. Marcos’s self-indulgent poetry, the battl re-enactments in Reality, the photo opportunities and Web pages should not be too hastily dismissed; even the EPR, the first of a number of retro Marxist-Leninist armed groups appearing in other states, have tried fielding a few ...”

“... conclude from all this that the Greek literature of the Roman Empire was decadent, fossilised and self-obsessed, a pale and lifeless shadow of the classical model it followed so slavishly. This has been, and remains, the opinion of many, and a general neglect is the result. Today, the greater part of this vast and various corpus remains unclaimed by ...”

“... our war’) could stand in the way of his plans. Campton’s fretfulness marks him as part of the self-indulgent expatriate community from which he imagines his art has set him apart: ‘These other men were whining at the interruption of their vile pleasures or their viler money-making; he, poor devil, was trembling for the chance to lay the foundation of a ...”

“... duty was to keep clear. Only ‘weak-chinned, weak-kneed liberals, social democrats and self-seeking gentlemen of no principles’ professed to believe otherwise. In Folsom’s unstructured account of the League’s history he comes back again and again to the question of the League’s Communist position. ‘Did the Communist Party control the ...”

“... the newspapers, coughing through his papirosi. Russian hospitality is complete and coercive, self-sacrificing and non-negotiable. I had with me my seven-year-old son, Jacob. We were given the smaller of the two rooms as our bedroom, while Sasha lodged with friends nearby, and Natasha, Tania and Nikolai slept in the larger room. No question of a hotel or ...”

“... wider than that of a mere transition from colonial to para-colonial institutions of African self-government, such as occurred around 1960. They are not thinking, that is, of the ending of the era of imperialism tout court, for they are too deeply versed in their subject to suppose that financial and trading imperialism can be anywhere near its ...”

“... well out of these dreams. I believe that man, nowadays, is more fanatical than ever. But it’s self-infatuation. He sings of nothing else, and in the action of the mind that leaps beyond the stars, devouring space and gazing on infinity, as Montaigne would say, he finds nothing more exalted than that same human misery from which the mind is constantly ...”

“... a given, whose components and attributes must always be there to be known or discovered, seems self-evident to the medical patient, the medical practitioner, the micro-biologist of the present day. Much writing in medical history takes it for granted that our current approaches to knowing and describing the body correspond exactly to an objective reality ...”

“... comfort to those who like to believe that ‘the problems of post-colonial nations are largely self-inflicted.’ There is shrewd analysis of certain habitual expressions of Naipaul, his use of such words as ‘mimicry’, ‘parasitism’, ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’, ‘self-violation’, ‘exile’ (rather than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to myself, were it not for the grace of God. And I at once found the thought so disgusting, so self-centred, so conceited, that I immediately banished it from my consciousness. Here and elsewhere in Somalia, Richburg the journalist fails in his duty to his subject. He finds the victims disgusting, while enjoying the company of the warlords, to whom he ...”

“... personalised: literally given a face. Death became ‘a threatening Other, or a morbid anti-self – the one we are each born to meet, an uncanny companion we carry with us through life, a hidden double who will discover himself at the appointed hour’. The second striking characteristic of Early Modern death was its shamefulness. The ‘Dance of ...”