“... us, and he is being quite serious, ‘great and gifted’. His mighty ego can easily accommodate self-criticism, which is engaging, sometimes even charming. But its chief merit is its utter contempt for civil servants, businessmen, military officers and almost all Clark’s colleagues, especially those who from time to time get in his way. Discretion is not ...”

“... awkwardly with the familiar narrative concerns of The Blue Afternoon; it’s an unnecessary and self-conscious writerly affection. Boyd is primarily a storyteller, and has never been shy of letting us know it. In The New Confessions John James Todd speaks confidentially to the reader: ‘Anyway, I digress. Let me tell you something about this enterprise ...”

“... charabanc as it makes its amiable progress through the better journals. The tone is a pert self-argument, a kind of educated mutter, as if life presented itself to Enright as an exam that needed to be marked – one can hear the tick and scrape of the red pen. In ‘Confetti’, for instance, the poet calls a taxi to take him and his pregnant wife to ...”

“... there was little rejoicing over the demise of the Alliance: instead, the Party engaged in a self-critical assessment of its own part in bringing about a decade of Mrs Thatcher. What makes things even worse for radical, progressive spirits is that the Ultra-Right appears to be even more in control of the Conservative Party this year than it has been ...”

“... Carey would want to dissent from this description. In a preliminary autobiographical section (‘Self’) he gives us the notorious ‘Down with Dons’ (1975), which hammers donnish cults such as that of Maurice Bowra, claims that dons tend to be insolent and bumptious and to have insolent and bumptious children, calls them ‘envious careerists’ devoting ...”

“... which is full democracy. But ancient administrators, even at their height, do not match the self-motivating efficiency of the grand Berlin bureausaurs Weber observed: what moved the ancients, he notes, was the boot, not esprit de corps. Not much could be hoped from the single public slave who presided over the Athenian archives. Down in the ...”

“... that is, the selected facts to support her assertions. Edwina’s part was to use her talent for self-publicity to grind her health education message into the nation’s skull. It had to be kept simple. To avoid cervical cancer, for instance: ‘Don’t smoke and don’t screw around.’ Her book’s tone is jarring and bright; there are faded incursions ...”

“... but it also wishes to promote along the way some image of the ideal Briton: he who combines self-reliance with a sense of public service. Of course, in order to prove that your self-reliance is genuinely tough-fibred and that your sense of public service is not just some youthfully liberal flash in the pan, you have ...”

“... to make the point that the son of the insurance salesman from Newark has done rather well for him self. May was/is ‘a gentile woman at the other end of the American spectrum from Josie. She had been sent off to the best schools by a Cleveland paint-manufacturing family that had achieved enormous financial success, as well as the civic distinction and social ...”

“... first wife as for her novels and short stories. It is testimony to Capote’s uncanny knack for self-promotion that at the time of the Life feature, he had produced only a handful of short stories: his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, would not appear for another six months. And whereas Stafford, who wrote very little fiction during the last twenty ...”

“... it must be admitted, like a card-carrying Fascist, but she did sound like a person of overweening self-confidence and historical naivety. ‘Individual Jews, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with Bolshevism. Clearly, the numbers on both sides were great enough for each to think the other primarily responsible for genocide. Since it is the least ...”

“... occupation and place of residence. Among the middle-class, being ‘Irish’ necessarily involves self-conscious effort: they are, after all, trying to hold onto something that increasingly has no sustaining material purpose. For some, the effort may be an attempt to learn Gaelic; for others, it may be membership of a society or study group (anything from the ...”

“... that were collective. If Gyp’s admiration for Bonaparte and Boulanger was a consequence of self-hatred and a quest for masculinity, how do we explain that same admiration on the part of millions of other male and female Bonapartists and Boulangists? In fact it was common for Legitimists to gravitate to Bonapartism. Many upper-class conservatives were ...”

“... J.G. Farrell’s trilogy. Burgess’s later Enderby Trilogy, by contrast, already shows too much self-indulgence, and his fatal tendency to achieve an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a portrait of the artist, with his own brand of self-indulgence concealed as satire. Burgess’s admiration for Joyce ...”

“... to the annual Bergman film, always sufficiently depressing to count as Art. Thus Mason is quaintly self-conscious and defensive about her tastes, pointing out that while historians of children’s literature dismiss the series books as ‘bad habits’, they constitute the primary reading that shaped the desires and fantasies of millions of American ...”