“... philosophical questions, notably theories of perception and mental association. Between pride and self-doubt, the author himself declares that most people will not be able to understand this material, and should not try. Across a striking hiatus in MS, we are then led to a vigorous magnification of the imagination as the supreme element of poetry, and an ...”

“... America about discipline and impersonality, an unpalatable intrusion into a theatre cursed by ‘self-loving earnestness’ and ‘ “serious”, eyes-glinting, next-door realism’. These failings are exemplified in productions of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (‘Auschwitz in New York’) and of Büchner’s ‘noble and complicated’ play Danton’s ...”

“... voyeur and sadomasochist. The scientist’s life story is one of unbroken commitment and self-transcendence. Born in 1894, Kinsey spent the first ten years of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous ...”

“... the seats at once of lust for gain and taste for luxurious ease which sapped the will to sacrifice self for state, and of the proletarian alienation and socialist militancy that placed the class before the national struggle. They need not have worried. The ability of each of the states concerned to represent its war as one of defence turned the flank of a ...”

“... idiom and coinages (‘diddleypush’, ‘rainbowy’) – are used to make this rhetorically self-conscious prose suggest the voice of a shelf-stacker in an Oban superstore. In the first novel one didn’t argue with this sleight-of-hand, partly because Morvern’s oddnesses were so seductive and her imagery so beautiful, but most of all because the book ...”

“... is “freedom” anyway?’). Heinrich understandably viewed his younger brother as self-absorbed, priggish and politically naive. They continued to exchange work, gossip amiably about critics and send each other birthday greetings, but there is no mistaking the resentments that would lead to their wartime estrangement. In a letter written just ...”

“... against the slave trade, and fostered projects for educational and political reform. Capable and self-assured, he combined progressive liberalism with a sharp eye for business. His interest in social betterment evidently did not extend to an involvement with the temperance movement, and he saw no difficulty in making his fortune out of distilling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public manner (at readings, or at literary-guest-laden meals) and the ...”

“... Strip. In 2010 their number will equal ours.’ Yet the real threat lies, surely, in the issue of self-identity and the degree of comprehension – not sympathy but human awareness – of one’s opponents. When Grossman speaks to a settler from Gush Emunim, he finds it hard to understand her: she talks ‘with pain of the sufferings of Israeli Arabs, on whom ...”

“... the fray, as eagerly as if the two countries had only just met. Like ACIS, BAIS can tap ethnic self-awareness: more subterranean and complex than in the Irish-American instance. Not only indifference or hostility within Britain, but the rhetoric that Ireland and Britain are alien, has left a vast interpenetration largely unexamined. Indeed, all the sins of ...”

“... personage and Oscar Wilde has been too much of a provocation for all but the most self-disciplined imagination. But the distance between the two is by no means easy to bridge. Oscar himself was notoriously less than obliging in terms of statements of gay identity, let alone gay pride, although he had more than a casual acquaintance with the ...”

“... that relating to its own dignity, a cause long recognised as lost by all except those whose self-esteem is ballooned by belief in it. In this regard, as in most matters, the Liberal Democratic reaction is the most comic, and the most revealing. Two of the Party’s senior spokesmen offered totally contradictory judgments on the conduct of the editor of ...”