“... 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 ‘In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he ...”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 ...”

“... a poem whose length, metrical regularity and sheer industriousness were meant to mock the brief, self-expressive, somewhat enervated ‘free verse’ of the bards who occupied its centre-stage. James, the newly ‘arrived’ innocent, had been genuinely shocked by the Literary World’s other-worldliness, and repelled by the drab limitedness of what his ...”

“... big enough.’ Her women respond to these indignities with genuine bewilderment and, sometimes, self-treachery, self-deceit. ‘Nobility was the attribute Kathleen invented for Cade.’ Sometimes they finally summon up indignation. ‘I’m free, Doctor. I’m not loose. I am free. Can you perceive, Doctor, that there is ...”

“... combines an evocative and clear-sighted account of growing up in small-town New Zealand with a self-conscious sub-plot which offers an explanation of how she was to become a psychiatric patient and a writer. She grew up in a poor but close-knit railway family, her overworked Christadelphian mother planting the first seeds of her imaginative life. Childhood ...”

“... and easier reading if he had not, like Richard Humphreys on the London years, limited himself so self-effacingly to the documentation, necessary thought that is. The problem, for instance, of Pound’s admiration for Brancusi, and of how that fits or does not fit with his other proclivities and principles, cannot for much longer be left where Alexander ...”

“... doubly austere. Yet Valentin and Molina’s own story is quintessentially romantic. Molina’s self-sacrifice in the revolutionary cause is a kind of Liebestod. It has to happen, since there can be no future for him after he has parted from Valentin. He has been vouchsafed a glimpse of heaven and cannot be allowed to live. In this respect, Kiss of the ...”