“... mysterious sequences leading to the heart of ‘the human predicament’, with unattainable love, self-consuming desire, the intertwining of past, present and future. The protagonists never know what has actually happened to them. Nor, frequently, do Duras’s viewers or readers. When she got control of a camera herself, her films became ...”

“... make up All around Atlantis has an ‘I’, and this may signal a further shift in Eisenberg’s self-denying aesthetic, her predilection for the other view that leaves more room for the voice of the text. In her two earlier collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, 12 years ago and Under the 82nd Airborne in 1992, narrators were in any case regularly ...”

“... stranger are deemed excessive: ‘of all the parts of a man that can hurt, a penis is the least’ Self-indulgence and inconsistency characterised The Female Eunuch as well, but they were rendered unimportant by the book’s overall zest. In 1970, Greer wrote as an optimist in tune with her time, and shaping it. This is a less buoyant, less coherent volume by ...”

“... by the late medieval Popes, more than half was unconverted before AD 1000. Even the peoples most self-consciously Christian by that date, like the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, had not been Christian when they migrated from Germany, or for several generations afterwards. The Christianisation of rural Francia, for instance, probably ended around 750: that is, two ...”

“... to the place in spite of its constraints. But perhaps the biggest problem remains the writer’s self that can never quite be abolished. Bail’s early London diaries, published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989), are a pointillist collection of beautiful, often self-regarding sentences, his own and ...”

“... unofficial motto, according to a story called ‘Pair a Spurs’, is ‘take care a your own damn self,’ but this extreme individualism is tempered by a desperate need for human contact, a need that produces tenderness and brutality in equal measure: Wyos are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it’s because they spend so much ...”

“... by far the subtler understanding of human personality, that phenomenon that crystallises where the self and not-self meet, as they always must in ...”

“... British politics, is in reality ‘another chapter of decline and fall, accompanied by ever wilder self-deceptions which are really compensations for a certain inescapable and shameful weakness of state’. Donald Dewar finds Nairn’s antithetical habit of mind infuriating (as in ‘Youthism is not a bad term for the resultant terminal condition: a strategy ...”

“... presents to his biographer does not involve tact. It is, rather, his own fuming, fulminating self, venting his increasingly despairing view of fallen man and contemporary society in a volcanic flow of written and spoken prose, an unmatchable style that expresses the man as graphically as none but the most gifted biographer can hope to do. He never wrote ...”

“... Management Initiative is actually making to efficiency: but perhaps that, too, was on the index of self-prohibited topics. It is harder to guess at the reasons for leaving out Europe, a word which does not appear even once in the lectures. I suppose that, apart from the escalating problem of the Community budget, the EEC has not loomed large in the ...”

“... at the outset, turned himself into a man for all seasons, all things to all men. Modelling his self-presentation upon the actor Talma, he studied his audiences and acted out his diverse roles – in the Academy, at Court, in the Museum, before the public – with consummate professionalism. And his skill in performance allowed him to remain hidden, the man ...”

“... is surely limited: ‘the world’s mistake in Oliver Cromwell’ was surely largely a case of self-deception. Cromwell and others around him did not sell out a cause in which they had once believed: they opposed a multiplicity of causes in which they had never believed. Cromwell had always believed in the right of the Saints to be captains (not ...”

“... itself from outside influences, the more responsive it is likely to be to internal traditions and self-imposed boundaries of thinking. In a sense, insulation permits objectivity – and we assume our undergraduate is relieved at last to hear that some degree of objectivity is possible. Poking behind the historian has been fashionable in the 20th ...”

“... his looks, from the women’s advances and revulsions. He covers himself with bandages – not in self-disgust, like Mr Samsa in Kafka’s tale, ashamed that he has become a beetle – but rather as a useful, interesting disguise. He climbs buildings as if he were flying, his bandages unfurl and roll down to earth, caught by an admiring boy who returns them ...”

“... Fleetwood that employees should not abandon the attitudes that they had held when they worked as self-employed. There may be truth in the assessment of their motives, but it is not based on direct information from the only people who could provide it. By the Sweat of their Brow is a more scholarly work, which has grown out of a doctoral thesis. It sets out ...”