“... melodrama and attention, and in pretentious claims for her creativeness, punctuated by lapses into self-loathing. Patrick White himself is at different times described by Alex as ‘the old sod’, someone ‘you can rely on’, someone she ‘can get round’, ‘a performer’, ‘looking his primmest’, ‘leaning on his stick, the born Mother ...”

“... Such a suggestion is of necessity pure speculation, and indeed it may well be wrong, but it is not self-evidently absurd. Nor does Richard Cromwell, as he appears in this book, look as convincing an architect of his own downfall as the ‘Tumble-down Dick’ on whom we were brought up. He fought back vigorously against his opponents, and, like Charles in ...”

“... distaste for, the grotesque American art world. Simonds is rebuked for inflicting on us his ‘self-invented and self-aggrandising ordeals’ in the slime, but elsewhere Schnabel is commended for his ‘display of energy and ambition’, his ‘lack of inhibition and decorum’, his ‘boisterous’ swagger. There are no ...”

“... with the expulsion of the Soviets. The Great Leap Forward, which followed, was a demonstration of self-reliance. The period of the Great Leap is described with authority and a wealth of detail in the middle volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s formidable Origins of the Cultural Revolution. It was a failure which left the country in a state of near-chaos. The ...”

“... essays, tell us about Sidgwick’s marginal comments.) In it we find that Russell is adopting ‘self-realisation’ as the standard. But this is still a morality in which we postulate some broadly-defined end and make everything else a means to it. And this style of moral reasoning he retained all his life: Granny’s worry that the relevant calculations ...”

“... been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a ...”

“... claim on its inside cover. It’s not the fraudulence of this that strikes the eye so much as the self-pity. The bosses of the new conservatism go about the place talking (but by no means looking) like the members of some dissident and persecuted underground. All you have to do, in order to sympathise with these neo-zealots, is pretend to yourself that the ...”

“... version of Henryson. There is a strangeness about some of these poems that recalls the self-consciousness of Hogg’s best fiction; for example when he interrupts himself, as he does in two different poems, to discuss the meaning and success of his own extended similes, or where his medieval dialect suddenly acknowledges its fakery by referring to ...”

“... world were contrived just for that: to enable peoples to become themselves more fully and self-consciously. Anglo-Britain, however, required a more distinctive, tailor-made garment. Neither ethnicity nor Tom Paine’s republican, civic-territorial nation could have stabilised the vital bond between the English masses and all their alien or ...”

“... the fabric of our everyday lives, however. Jennifer Terry has a gift in the popular columnist and self-described ‘motherless’ man Philip Wylie, who coined the term ‘momism’ to describe the American mother’s dominating influence over her children, particularly her sons, and whose bestselling book Generation of Vipers (1942) blamed ‘megaloid ...”

“... the effect has been to convert a small cadre of soldiers and a few bands of villagers armed for self-defence into the beginnings of a national uprising – a good parallel is Ireland in 1916. When I was here in March friends were still telling me they thought the KLA might be a Serbian security force provocation, invented to justify repression. When I came ...”

“... effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North ...”

“... entirely flippant. Size was a more noticeable factor than age in his relationship to his childhood self. Vulnerability, ignorance (which is not the same as innocence) and the necessity of accepting an apparently endless succession of baffling and sometimes alarming developments are the essential experiences of childhood which adults, especially when they ...”

“... shift in artistic voice from the active to the passive, from painting as an arena for existential self-expression (the alternative account of Abstract Expressionism put forward by Harold Rosenberg) to painting as a surface where external signs are impressed. Where Rauschenberg played ‘in the gap between … art and life’, a motto that suited his ...”

“... ill-cultivated swamp’ – was, Hazeldine argues, briefly but vitally compatible with southern self-interest. Nascent factory capitalism was tied in with the imperial expansion and nautical shoulder-barging that helped the City of London to bank the profits of global trade. The UK’s ‘head-start mercantilism’ offered ‘a massive helping of state aid ...”