“... genius confined him to what Henry James called the madness of art, since that is exclusive, self-inflicted, entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Colet, whom she attempts to reinstate as a female icon and ‘yet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seen the light.’ He also owns another house not quite so splendid but very lucrative. Another self, an alter ego, the billionaire that he might have become had he stayed in ‘monstrous’ New York, begins to emerge as he negotiates the contracts on his property development project. The house on the jolly corner he leaves empty of furniture, but filled ...”

“... lets Eunice down his ‘souvenirs’, those ‘exercises of memory’ so precious to his sense of self, would ‘stink’. ‘A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.’ Ijah makes no propaganda for what he has become – a legal and political adviser to bankers on foreign loans. He prefers to interest himself in the ...”

“... to think that a sign-relation is built into nature is to revert to the idea that there are ‘self-identifying objects’ and ‘species’ there ... Such an idea made sense in the context of a Medieval world view ... In the context of a 20th-century world view, by contrast, to say in one’s most intimidating tone of voice ‘I believe that causal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of academics, was well aware that the muse can be overpowered and seduced. In his Memoirs and self-adulatory campaign narratives, Montgomery enhanced his own undeniably great achievements by denigrating Auchinleck’s generalship and by exaggerating the poor condition of the Eighth Army when he assumed command in August 1942. Montgomery’s version of the ...”

“... 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 ...”