“... Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the narrative. Lockridge was so depressed by the scorn that the prize brought him that he killed himself the same ...”

“... She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty hours a day until he achieved fame and fortune. Like Wilson, Hanson came from Milnsbridge, Huddersfield, but his origins were not quite as humble as his accent might ...”

“... an important part in the forging of this class-consciousness, which was inseparable from ethnic self-respect. Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, often dismissed as a misconceived irrelevancy in American black history, is here treated with much greater respect as one manifestation of a rising national consciousness which is class-orientated in principle ...”

“... conforming, in her struggle from faith to free-thinking, to a recognisable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive ...”

“... commonly rely upon a concept of desert, which itself depends upon a wholly mysterious concept of self-determination, and I do not see how there is any place for such concepts if, to the extent to which an action is not completely determined by physical or mental causes, it has to be viewed as occurring by chance. On this point I agree with Honderich, who ...”

“... but also because occupation is bad for Israel, for the values of Zionism as a movement of national self-determination and for the social structure of Israel. Occupation has already brutalised Israel, and its prolongation will brutalise it further. So my unease is not with the political implications of the book, with which I generally agree. My unease is with ...”

“... writers wrote at all, in such difficult circumstances, vindicates writing. ‘Utterance itself was self-justifying and creative,’ he says of Mandelstam, ‘like nature.’ The dichotomy between art and life remains intact, without rendering art ineffectual. Contemplating East European faith in art, Heaney is able to say what he would not otherwise have been ...”

“... with a drinking problem. He disappears for days at a time, and when at home he’s a stranger in self-imposed exile on the porch at night, darkly nursing a beer. Their mother, Audrey, is a tiresome, self-satisfied woman, painfully aware of her entrapment in a life of waste and emptiness; her pettiness and appalling ...”

“... to Carlos Serrano in 1961. In that letter he speaks of a ‘constant struggle between the need for self-expression and the desire for self-effacement’. Renoir is everywhere in his films, even in the places we least expect him to be. He is not only the film-maker but also the object of his makings; it is as if there were ...”

“... salvation is contained in Scripture alone; that the message of Scripture is single, coherent and self-validating; and that it had been perverted by churchly forms, traditions and innovations from some date after its delivery in Palestine to the time of Martin Luther and the other 16th-century reformers, who broke the mould and put things right. I am not sure ...”

“... It’s not a disaster, far from it. It’s a lumpy, unequal, slow-moving book, more than a little self-congratulatory, but it refuses, with its returning hero Yossarian, to treat death with the respect that is due to life, and it is often very funny. The first voice we hear is that of Sammy Singer, the (in Catch-22) unnamed ‘small tail gunner’ who kept ...”

“... career with zealous rage. Meeting, in his dream, a contemporary who now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ...”

“... instead of coming whining to their parents to have buttons fastened, it would do much for their self-esteem and turn them into self-reliant citizens. This rough-hewn psychological approach led to a brief spurt in profits. Stores were induced to show customers a short film entitled ‘Bye-Bye Buttons’, just as dentists ...”

“... world stage, has disintegrated, Scots Toryism been demolished by its English counterpart and the self-consciously Scotch or kailyard school of literature regained the ascendancy. In England, or at least in the metropolis, John Buchan evokes that primordial English resentment that is the reward of all ambitious North Britons. For our family, his life is the ...”

“... again, then. Here we go. The severe outlines of Kennedy’s writing, together with its relentless self-concern, hardly seem calculated to make an immediate appeal. She does not offer the pleasures or complexities of lyrical language, and her sharp, spare sentences can suggest an alienating aggression towards both characters and readers. What might be still ...”