“... the Catholicism of the One, True, Universal Church so much as the tribal ritual of a people whose self-belief depends less on religion than on history. The contrast with Britain could hardly be greater. Britain is the only area of northern European Protestantism Tóibín ventures into. History has produced here a pathology in which disputes about the nature ...”

“... and certainly his less agreeable traits such as selfishness and want of consideration and of self-discipline grew more pronounced. Bringing Consuelo over made no apparent difference: he still telephoned his friends and acquaintances at all hours to read them great passages of his most recent work, and he was capable of getting Consuelo out of bed twice ...”

“... has always been a classic Modernist, committed to an exemplary Modernist programme of narrative self-doubting, tricksy uncertainty-mongering, caginess, the unsettling of readers – what Finnegans Wake knows as HeCitEncy, hesitation about citing. And Ghosts keeps up the old Modernist ways. ‘Here they are. There are seven of them. Or better say, hall a ...”

“... that she is writing poetry: Rouse remembers it too dutifully. Several of her poems are stiff and self-conscious. ‘M3’, for instance, about the motorway (she lives in London) begins: Mean as a length of flex, it snubs the B road, Disliking breakdown and hiker, impedimenta This sounds like everyone else; worse, it announces itself, with comical ...”

“... ideological construct, ‘parents’. In modern Conservative thinking parents are indignant, self-confident, active proponents of a no-nonsense (probably Christian) education; are, in fact, rather like Baroness Blatch. Parents are, therefore, allowed to be elected as school governors and to make decisions. But most parents are not like Baroness ...”

“... gave to Department of Trade investigators who asked him about bribes. When he tried his customary, self-denigrating flannel, an inspector interrupted: That’s no answer.’ Tiny snapped: ‘It’s my business. That is my answer.’ Rowland’s vendetta with established British capitalists cracked open previously impenetrable bunkers of secret ...”

“... she is in her straightforward, unaffected vein. Her heightened style lets her down; she becomes self-indulgent. Some readers may like it, of course. But as their grief died down, Emily and Caroline, still daughters in their minds, began to hear their parents speak. So began a colloquy that would go on until they in turn left the world to their grieving ...”

“... but the technology of warfare has transformed the moral and practical problems associated with self-defence. Nobody claims a right to own a personal nuclear deterrent, or even a private heat-seeking missile, though some over-anxious Americans would like to have their own tanks or bazookas. Many would prefer a virtually complete ban on guns. Joyce ...”

“... Foot’s idolatry of Bevan was somewhat soft-headed. Bevan was, after all, a childish, petulant, self-centred man, far too convinced of his own charm and persuasiveness. In the end he quite royally let his own followers down while always expecting them to do his will. When Tribune had the nerve to criticise him, his wife, Jennie Lee, tried to have the paper ...”

“... his theory to her own view of the life-and-death struggle: it became, for her, part of the fierce self-justification of a natural fighter – she did not hold with Freud’s majestic hypothesis that human beings unconsciously recognised the ‘sublime necessity’ of the return to the inorganic state. Like many passionately committed writers, she created a ...”

“... infuriating decade’). In her career as a reporter, Gellhorn has rarely let her anger slide into self-righteousness and, in the end, amused self-deprecation is never far away. Gellhorn left the United States for Europe in 1930, at the age of 21. By her own account, she cut a rather comic figure. ‘I intended to become a ...”

“... undecidable. Rudolf, while acknowledging that the story is centrally concerned with doubt and self-doubt, nevertheless feels he has to take sides, and accordingly dismisses the judgment of Porbus and Poussin; where they see nothing (‘there is nothing on his canvas’), he sees avant la lettre the shapes and textures of Giacometti and de Kooning. This ...”

“... writings that poses the main problem. More disconcerting is the spirit of cheerful, even boastful self-contradiction that runs throughout them. Borrowing a handy phrase from J.A. Downie, Backscheider remarks that at times Defoe appears not so much an individual as ‘a team of writers’. Even this under-estimates his protean talents. Often he delighted in ...”

“... Oberman’s translator is easy, conversational, a trifle slipshod. Evidence about Luther’s inner self and its workings being so fragmentary, ‘all suspicions against psychohistory must be put aside.’ This is a pronouncement as bold as any of Luther’s own, but in Oberman’s handling of the method it does not float away, as it so easily can, into ...”

“... charged, but also essentially constituted by solitariness: hence essentially (and literally) self-seeking in its sexuality (for there is, à la limite, no one else): hence narcissistic and auto-erotic at base; and in so far as it extends its sexuality to others at all, pederastic (pederasty here being a seeking for one’s own past ...”