“... or who has read Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), will be familiar with this sort of self-regarding fury. ‘I should like to think,’ Davie ominously begins a sentence in Purity of Diction, ‘that this study might help some practising poet to a poetry of urbane and momentous statement.’ Like most practising poets, Enright did not take ...”

“... life with the supreme excitement of combat readiness, that intensely pleasurable feeling of self-possession that comes from the knowledge that a fight to the death might start at any time, and that one is prepared for it, by mental disposition and acquired skills. The moments of actual combat – uninterrupted hours of combat are a physical ...”

“... Jacobin jailers by paying social calls from cell to cell, composing madrigals, retaining utter self-control and carrying on with light, debonair conversation, even while awaiting the tumbrils that would take them to the guillotine. Is there any reason why we should trust this late 19th-century reactionary – an interesting thinker, but an exceptionally ...”

“... scolding’ except private parodic performances among themselves of their father’s anger and self-pity (‘O God, O God, O God, have pity on me and grant me patience’). McGahern found books in the shambolic farmhouse of the Protestant Moroneys, who, in between picking bees out of their beards, gave him freedom to range in their library. His success at ...”

“... liberation, but stayed on to live under post-colonial majority governments. Their level of self-awareness, she argues, was greater than Memmi’s psychological portrait allowed, for these were people who saw that colonialism had ‘misshapen them too’ and that its privileges were distortions. They welcomed the withdrawal of these privileges in ...”

“... years, if indeed they ever did. To her credit, she is no hagiographer; she is aware of the more self-indulgent and pretentious aspects of Berdyaev’s life and work in particular. (She tells us, incidentally, that Brodsky admired Berdyaev, but the object of his and his generation’s greatest admiration among intellectuals of that period was Lev ...”

“... citizens don’t necessarily see. But this isn’t how Hemon works: America, to Pronek, with its self-help books, baseball and optimism, is all the same and all surface. He can’t see further because America doesn’t make sense to him: he loses his job as a waiter when he mistakes iceberg lettuce for romaine. Like the little boy in ‘Islands’ he can ...”

“... unusual degree autobiographical. The Enigma of Arrival may be the most important of his essays in self-understanding, for it says more than the others about the complexity of his attachments to England. Half a Life has some of the now familiar blend of autobiography and fiction, and offers a different view of the early London years. Closer to fact, though no ...”

“... who painted a negative portrait of Edward after the King’s death ‘in order to retain his own self-regard and not own up to the fact that he was, for all his intellectual brilliance, a moral coward, a vacillator and a compromiser’. Heffer’s loathing obscures the fact that the personal relationship between sovereign and Prime Minister is as important a ...”

“... if he was playing golf or driving a rickshaw’ – and by their perfumed wives in the clubhouse; self-satisfied conversations at the club revolve around Ivy League schools and the choice of Scotch on Concorde. Price is appalled by the smugness of this moneyed crowd and keeps to himself. Timmy Price inherits his father’s indignation, but not his golf ...”

“... is through peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. In addition to being a vehicle for self-promotion, often at others’ expense, The Seven Daughters of Eve serves as a marketing device. The dust cover of the hardback edition proclaimed that Sykes ‘has always emphasised the importance of the individual in shaping our genetic world. The website ...”

“... the winning charisma of billboard bimbo Angelyne, vertically-challenged child star Gary Coleman, self-proclaimed smut peddler Larry Flynt, and 151 other amusing candidates ($3500 was enough to get your name on the ballot). These included the ultra-right, anti-abortion state senator Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball ...”

“... men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.The novel is peppered with ...”

“... in the Dáil to explain what he regretted most about his time at the wheel: the failure of a self-aggrandising stadium project in Dublin, nicknamed the ‘Bertie Bowl’, which had led his own coalition partners to compare him to Nicolae Ceausescu. With this mea culpa went the news that the man of the people would be drawing a pension of almost ...”

“... simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.’ Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The Marriage Plot, and sought to marry the formal mechanics and self-consciousness of postmodernism with the moral and ...”