“... 15 of his 53 years as a tinplate worker, and six more (and very valuable ones they were for his self-education) immured in Dorchester Jail. This is a well-researched and notably sympathetic study of a difficult man. Its limitations are partly due to Wiener’s narrow focus and partly inseparable from his hero. Apart from his publicist ventures in the late ...”

“... Walter Benjamin, and from the dependable Emerson: ‘Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.’ Here is the touch of wonder required for Rortian aphorism. It isn’t to be found everywhere among the thousands Gross gives us, but there is no dearth of material, the aphoristic mines are not worked out, and we need not fear a shortage of edifying ...”

“... that America was lacking in soul.’ Bettelheim’s tone of cultural superiority and unhesitant self-assurance is nowhere more annoying than in his discussion of the Oedipus complex. After being told that most of his American graduate students have had ‘only the scantest familiarity’ with either the Oedipus myth or Sophocles’s play, Bettelheim treats ...”

“... It was Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, of Private Property and the State. Joe’s self-education raised him from his peasant origins to a sense of himself as an intellectually aware member of the industrial proletariat. Muriel’s education was a process of unlearning the attitudes of the Middle-American plutocracy into which she was ...”

“... richly rewarding to American writers. Blue Rise is set in Mississippi, but it is far from being a self-congratulatory old-time wallow. The inhabitants know how quaint their culture is and sell it in antique shops. It is Mississippi revisited, by Jeannine, a young woman who has escaped from it to marriage in a northern city. She is astounded on her return to ...”

“... of the theory he accepted from Wilde, that a writer gains mastery of himself by creating an anti-self or mask and striking through it. Fulfilling the doctrine of the mask, Synge won a place for himself as one of the two representatives of Phase 23 in Yeats’s A Vision – the other was Rembrandt. ‘In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he ...”

“... book was published in 1958. Is he right to look back at the growth of the Welfare State as ‘a self-liquidating political movement’? The coming of adult male suffrage was a key event in Europe. The poor now had votes. It was all the more necessary for property to pay its ‘ransom’. In Britain, Lloyd George was the greatest exponent of radical ...”

“... power-diffusing where the ‘Attlee consensus’ concentrated power. Above all, it will have to be self-consciously and explicitly constitutional, in a sense in which the ‘Attlee consensus’ was not. It will have to be concerned, not just with the ends for which state power can be used, but with the way in which power is won and held: not just with the ...”

“... only philosophically unjustified but politically retrograde. These concepts are said to express a self-glorifying myth of the sovereign Western ego, a myth that enables professional élites to repress disruptive textual – which is to say, psychological and social – forces. Accordingly, these critics conceive of texts, not as communications by individual ...”

“... as ‘one of our time’s two or three major analytic intellects’; I am indulging in this self-quotation because the present dust-jacket uses it, in the legitimate hope that ‘the publication of Vindications will help to ensure that, if only after his death, his true stature will eventually be recognised, in Britain as elsewhere.’ What the 32-page ...”

“... and spasmodic reactions to war and revolution. It might be clearer to say that he made them feel self-conscious about their lapses into commitment. And self-consciousness, often of the most exorbitant kind, has been the thing ever since. Was Wolfe just having fun at the expense of the smart set? He certainly worked hard at ...”

“... the idea of remembering the names of great masters, and hence the very idea of art history, the self-conscious pursuit of originality in art – these are all topics which, Alsop rightly insists, cannot be explored without reference to art-collecting. Much of his book consists of an outstandingly thorough investigation of the growth of art-collecting and ...”

“... than it may seem. History is occasionally decided by it. One would like to know how the balance of self-esteem stands between SAS, Marine commandos and Paras after the Falklands war. Clarke describes in detail the nastiness and toil of the soldier’s lot in Northern Ireland. He may be lying up in some hidden observation post, excreting into plastic ...”

“... was the cult animal of these islands. In other words, Redgrove’s poem is not only inaccurate but self-defeating. That one mechanically-adduced detail destroys the point of what he was trying to do, which was to send up one of our tribal totems. It’s an irony worth exploring that two poets so opposed to a mechanistic outlook as Hughes and Redgrove should ...”

“... is to say, he does not believe that our only authentic knowledge of the true God is that God’s self-revelation, a self-revelation to be received only by faith. But he equally repudiates the natural theology of neo-Thomism and indeed of St Thomas himself: ‘There is ... no two-level reality, consisting of a ...”