“... 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 ...”

“... the shacks and tents of Ein-Husub’ near the Jordanian border. Tlallim is a desert tramp, a self-styled (Russian Jewish) nomad who lives out of the back of a beat-up jeep. He immediately divines what Yonatan is up to, guessing every detail of his plan to steal across the border by night into Jordan and visit the ruined city of Petra. And he sees the ...”

“... by the use of experiments to authorise scientific theories: for experiments were the preserve of a self-appointed group of professionals whose claim to authority was no better than those of the other groups which Hobbes devoted his life to attacking – notably the clergy of an established church. At a deeper level, however, Shapin and Schaffer also believe ...”

“... sunny, easy-going and benevolent figure that he depicts’. I would never have described Daley’s self-portrait in those terms. Daley is quite ferocious and unforgiving in his account of other policemen, especially those who taunted him about his homosexuality: Sergeant Hunter was a rat ... Without a friend in the world and incapable of any action that was ...”

“... will certainly outlive them both. He is his country’s most eminent writer, his works are few, self-contained (very Paraguayan) and brilliantly written. Yet his masterpiece, I the Supreme, which first came out in Spanish in 1974 and finally reaches the English reading public today, in a suitably masterful translation by Helen Lane, is the kind of summa ...”

“... it came back to me why I felt as I did. In the play, Ruth Kaplan charges Yaron with gross self-interest. She claims that Yaron’s reward for keeping silent about the fate he knew awaited the Hungarian Jews in the camps was that he, his family and his associates would be allowed to emigrate to Israel. Yaron’s defence is twofold. If he had not obeyed ...”

“... the London clubs which were coming into their own at this time, such behaviour reflected a more self-conscious and assertive masculine style. But this brittle machismo did not express itself in stiff upper lips, which were a Victorian and not a Georgian invention. Think of Burke in December 1792 flinging a dagger onto the floor of the Commons as a symbol of ...”

“... loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the humorous self-perception of which he was capable: both men shared in their different ways the restlessness and the need for total dominance of a ‘perfect’ environment. ‘He wanted an island all of his own,’ writes Lawrence in the story: ‘not to be alone on ...”

“... fantasy and gratification, as of female preoccupation, defensiveness, embarrassment and self-awareness. Not only does the real North American man show himself as a tit-man but the real woman is a tit-woman. In the pop annals of the transatlantic sex war, we have often heard the male denounce the archetypal woman as a ‘ball-breaker’. It now ...”

“... play tricks on scientists, especially when they are given such a golden opportunity either for self-glorification or for the glorification of their God. Anonymity, in this context, is no guarantee against a tendency on the part of informants to swank about their supposed religious experiences: God presumably knows the identity of each informant even if ...”

“... Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage production recordings and the printed text. Gaskell convincingly demonstrates that ...”