“... be the result of the greater seriousness and scale of the undertaking. But there is a good deal of self-criticism in the press, and evidence of a bad conscience about the country’s absurd dependency on cheap oil and on the political arrangements necessary to guarantee it. I think, also, that there is a vague impression that Arab nationalism might have a ...”

“... then, and tells us that avoiding it has become a preoccupation now. Nevertheless, behind his self-castigation a certain complacency seems to lurk. The impression may partly be created by the mature Julian’s intermittent reflections on life in general: these tend towards a weary fatalism of tone which in turn creates an exonerating context for the ...”

“... for women. Family resources enabled her to acquire a university education, and she was financially self-sufficient throughout her long career. A friendship with George Gissing (they corresponded at least once a week for ten years) admitted her to a world of artistic achievement. She embodies the independence of the new woman. Yet she emerges from Jane ...”

“... close of the 15th century. It is the Marrano configuration of spirit and language, of conduct and self-consciousness, with its literally numberless nuances of dissimulation, of doubt, of anguished scepticism and remorse, which, according to Yovel, is the source and informing dominant in the entirety of Spinoza’s life and labours. This is not a novel ...”

“... to be ashamed of – though ‘taking the Fifth’ (as invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination was called at the time) was never a very impressive public posture. But what they plainly felt entitled to in their old age was their privacy – and to see their son, of all people, invading it can hardly have made their distress any easier to ...”

“... Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of Munich, grows up in an enclosed and self-righteous little community in Catholic West Flanders. The Seynaeves are anti-semitic (though until the outbreak of war Louis has never set eyes on a Jew), anti-socialist, anti-French, anti-Protestant, anti-Brussels and anti-government. Their right-wing ...”

“... that morning was of German professional competence and decent seriousness and British self-love and exhibitionism. Not everyone has admired Lord Hailsham as he unquestionably admires himself. The tone is beautifully echoed in Hailsham’s account of his meeting with Khrushchev. ‘Khrushchev was a countryman to his fingertips. The only man I have ...”

“... desultorily in a sea of Elizabeth. She was a copious, enthusiastic, fluent correspondent; he a self-conscious and anxious one. She enjoyed receiving letters as much as writing them, even when she was being used as a nominal addressee of travel letters intended for publication: ‘I accept with open hands – arms your correspondence,’ she wrote to Mary ...”

“... took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from historicity, location, nature and culture. What interests us about Descartes in this context is the fact that he sought to empower the ...”

“... 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 ...”