“... light, and she was flustered and breathing hard.’ The dancer aims to impress, but she is also self-deluded. The poet is not. ‘When she came upstairs she sat at this table and tried to write poetry. It came very hard. When she was small, words had flown out of her like birds; now they fell back into her like stones. Their hardness seemed to lacerate ...”

“... nationalism finally triumphed in the Republic of Ireland, and the state settled down as a dull and self-satisfied monolith. The old Protestant business class, Beckett’s class, would then lose all its power. The writing is self-conscious: it reads as though the writer wrote it merely to read it himself. And indeed he did ...”

“... and again in popular science books, and there is not much new here. What is new is Weinberg’s self-conscious concern for philosophical issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or ...”

“... enemies – a teddybear, his name – and anyone may be his enemy. He and his chums contemplate self-defence against a teacher who likes to grip their balls while asking them questions – but what’s even the One-Two Punch against someone who’s got you by the balls? His dissertation on conkers says everything about the ruses of seniority in these ...”

“... Kali, in the other the Old One, eat their prey – the difference being that Taliesin’s previous self Gwion runs away from the Old One, whereas Vikram offers himself up to Kali willingly, hoping to outwit her. The cauldron in which Vikram is cooked to a crisp replicates ‘the fluid darkness’ of the Old One’s womb, and both stories of pain and loss of ...”

“... delicate skill, steering Stevens through his solemnities, orotundities, deceptions and self-deceptions, treading with frozen dignity through the corridors of power. The earlier novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were wholly or almost wholly set in Japan. This is the first Ishiguro novel to be set wholly in ...”

“... and indignation at his treatment by the establishment, continued to exhibit a rare and often self-deprecatory wit. Consider his account of the start, in 1827, of his life-long passion for Shakespeare: ‘As I came out of Hamlet, shaken to the core by the experience, I vowed I should not expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius ...”

“... this latest bulletin have to say? For Paul Johnson, intellectuals are conspicuously ruthless and self-interested males. They are secular: he makes use of the term ‘secular intellectual’ as if there were other varieties, but none is exhibited. They are violent and drunken. They are ungrateful to the ‘kind’ persons who assist them, and who are ...”

“... he can stay off the streets, steer clear of heroin and crack, and keep his nose clean: intelligent self-defence is as much the impulse in this account as hungry aggression. The mottos on the gym wall back him up: ‘Do Sports not Drugs,’ ‘It is Better to Build Men than to Mend Boys.’ For most young fighters who want to turn professional, the prospect of ...”

“... street theatre in all this – people arguing for the sake of argument, rediscovering the joy of self-expression after years of self-repression. I went for the first time just before the Party Conference in July. At six o’clock, the square was already packed with people. In one of the largest groups, an impressive young ...”

“... but it is clear that in writing these chapters, she made a conscious attempt to avoid both self-pity and recrimination. Occasionally, the lengths to which she goes to be positive and even-handed are startling. ‘Slavery had its dark side as well as its bright side,’ for example, is a rather incongruous remark. She describes her own master, who sent ...”

“... sense of the authorial presence racing to snare memory beyond memory – without a hint of the self-promoting strategist faking the odds to ensure a final apotheosis. The plot will be familiar to readers of ghosted East End gangster memoirs: bother with the law, church, boxing club, billet in the White Tower, Colchester, battalion champion, guardhouse, on ...”

“... the New Forum and the Peace and Human Rights movement. They wanted a humane, democratic GDR, a self-governing civil society and not a Western takeover. Jens Reich, one of the most intelligent and sympathetic figures of the New Forum, has said that he first experienced a GDR identity after the overthrow of Honecker and Krenz. In the year that followed few ...”

“... listened for. The O is both something and nothing, origin and omega, mother and rooted sense of self. Heaney consigns himself to living with its equivocations, in the fullness of absence. The haw is not a lantern, but he will live by its light, ‘its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on’. The round O’s in the book evoke maternity, ...”

“... puzzlement or blankness can be her only response. She has immense physical resilience and self-confidence, an alarming urge to dominate, and a combative and powerful presence. But she is also uninformed, endlessly self-deceived and, though by no means unintelligent, seemingly incapable of intellectual reflection or ...”