“... there, a roll there’, and wonders ‘if there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion’. That a man in Guerrillas is overweight indicates sinister intent.Neglect of the body in his work is like a moral fault. In Uganda we exercised by running round a sports field. Naipaul said that only ‘infies’ – inferiors – allowed ...”

“... dancing, and continuing through the rest of her performance, she had what appeared to be a small self-absorbed smile on her face, her mouth open more than is usual in a smile, as if she was privately contemplating her body, enjoying its movements. Her smile muted whatever tawdry theatricality attached to the scene and to her dance, purifying them by virtue ...”

“... even when he got mixed up with the Levellers in the later 1640s, resisted all the temptations to self-righteousness and to blind partisanship that the Revolution offered. His family, his library and his garden preserved his sense of proportion. So did his scientific interests, which led him, after the defeat of his political ideas, to devote his time to the ...”

“... will. Opaque, and utterly out of character insofar as willing never came easily to this massively self-doubting man. The great revelation for most of us reading L’Avenir dure longtemps, and the first volume of Yann Moulier Boutang’s accompanying biography, must be the depth and regularity of the mental crises from which Althusser suffered all through his ...”

“... abilities secured him the College’s organ scholarship during his first term, making for proud self-sufficiency at the price of a strenuous programme. Active in the Union, he became one of the leading Conservative speakers, but did not make a real splash until he broke with Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement after Munich. In the Oxford by-election of ...”

“... which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland self-satisfaction.* It is startling to read that Parkinson – a man singled out by the Economist as an outstandingly bad minister – was her ideal Foreign Secretary. Parkinson was, after all, a not especially well educated small businessman, with no particular ...”

“... to Part One of the book. He sees Tennyson’s career divided into a phase of post-Romantic self-making, followed by a phase of cultural engagement. In Part Two, as Tucker promises, historical context is allowed back, and the book becomes both more interesting and more persuasive: but it never fully recovers from this distinction. The idea that ...”

“... in terms of any single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self. Without this there is no art.’ Take out the ‘struggle’ bits, and scale down Greenberg’s own views of the ‘revolutionary’ potential of Pollock and de Kooning, and you have a defence of high-bourgeois artistic integrity: initially set against the ...”

“... in the West Indies.’ The African revival, as he sees it, may provide a ‘startling access of self-respect’, but can’t help West Indians to root themselves more firmly in the Caribbean. For Walcott, then, the first step towards creating a West Indian identity is to resist the meanings conferred by history or mythology since the histories and myths in ...”

“... critical style as he sees it – smooth, conversational, exhibiting a lack of original thought and self-reflection: ‘a civil art’, when Hartman feels admiring, ‘a civil jargon’ when he doesn’t. He can be stern on the subject; tea and totality don’t mix, he says, though the British are always trying to mix them. When critics like me try to ...”

“... many merits of Brading’s magisterial study that it focuses primarily on the opinions, fantasies, self-perceptions and moral outlook of our hero in his Spanish American habitat, as these changed (or did not change) over more than three and a half centuries. (How splendid if it would inspire self-consciously comparative ...”

“... The man who composes the post-humous testament controls history. In the fraternal spirit of a self-confessed plagiarist, Home lets it be known that the whole thing was his theft in the first place, lifted from Gustav Metzger, who outlined the original proposal in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition ‘Art into Society/Society into Art’ at the ICA ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and other maritime folklore which attached to his theme. He certainly indulged from the start in a self-conscious connoisseurship of the whole experience, with a penchant for collecting mementoes. By most standards, however, Dudley told the facts ‘plainly’ and neither his German rescuers nor the people at Falmouth seem to have reacted with special ...”