“... The sentences are wildly peripatetic and his philosophy, by Shavian standards, shockingly self-indulgent. He has equipped himself with all the apparatus of happiness: the glass of wine (champagne); the reference library of verse and prose; the loaf of garlic bread; and Thou at the end of a telephone line. Flying from one festival to the next, he ...”

“... semantic plurality. He is suggesting that such a systematic duality of meaning radically flaws the self-consistency of the text, and that it is in the nature of written discourse to be so flawed. Equally, when Derrida considers the alternative possible readings of Mallarmé’s ‘Mimique’, he does not allow us to rest with the convenient notion of ...”

“... Bogie pours whisky in a steady stream. Small vices. It’s by virtue they are gripped. Of self-indulgence there is not a gleam. She wavers but he has the strength of ten As time goes by and Sam plays it again. Reagan and Thatcher ought to be like that. Instead they have a frightful falling-out. The Russian pipeline has inspired the spat, Or that’s ...”

“... pity and horror no less than wonder; nor does it shrink from displaying the fears and passions and self-deceptions which their life naturally causes men to conceive and to act on. Mr Griffin expounds this poetic vision with great force and clarity. He is also familiar with a wide range of epic poetry and historical narrative from cultures which were neighbours ...”

“... for a man who chose to study early modern England out of admiration for R.H. Tawney and drew a self-portrait in referring to historians of élites as ‘disappointed egalitarians whose misanthropy springs directly from outraged moral sentiment’. Like Veblen, Stone has what might be called a savage eye. Some of his most brilliant passages depend on ...”

“... Woodforde is modest, affectionate, and wholly without snobbery, and while some may say that in a self-portrait he is bound to be so, it has to be remembered that in a diary stretching across nearly fifty years a great many unflattering lines will usually have crept in to balance any attempt by the writer to present his good side only. And then there are ...”

“... letters, rejoinders, poems and memoirs) is not an exercise in explanation: it is an exercise in self-indulgence. As a political statement, it adds relatively little to Thompson’s last collection of essays, published in Britain as Zero Option and in the United States as Beyond the Cold War. And as a literary effort, it is in every way inferior ...”

“... is the opposite: they are hugely outnumbered by the tutorial drones, the committee bores, the self-consciously Great and Good, and the peculiar tribe of Oxford man-boys. This more mediocre majority is alarmed by the sheer ability of some of the mavericks and, even more, by their habit of truth-telling. This means that they are ‘not sound’, that their ...”

“... of what the same speaker calls ‘this world-cataclysmic drama’. As for the second passage, how self-important would you have to be (at 15) to ‘become conscious of an oscillation of temperament’, or ‘appreciate a countervailing vision of tolerant scepticism’? Surely neither life nor Sheila Rowbotham is like that. But the sense of whatever authentic ...”

“... it. This is an uncharacteristically personal passage which seems, on the one hand, dramatically self-conscious, and on the other, to be an attempt to answer the Kantian question: ‘what am I for?’ Yeats is describing the revolutionary’s sense of being a dead man on leave, of having no personal life, but in doing so he is also engaging in a piece of ...”

“... to admit that they probably irradiated some innocent bystanders. The United States Government self-righteously fights any liability tooth and claw in the courts. The British Government hides behind an Act of Parliament which was never intended to assist in avoiding culpability. On 3 October 1952, the British Government, anxious to retain its role as a ...”

“... to his wife Edwina one has merely to read the part of Amanda Wingfield in that first great play: self-deludingly optimistic, desperately domineering, a faded Southern belle marooned in a noisy, dirty city which no longer recognised her kind. Sickly, solitary Tom was contemptuously dismissed as ‘Miss Nancy’, but it was the fate of his sister Rose which ...”

“... appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but ...”

“... ambitions. It says something either for its political naivety or, more probably, for its self-absorption that it did nothing of the sort. In the years after Mrs Thatcher came to power the BBC continued to grow. It added around three thousand staff to its already large payroll. It expanded into further areas of broadcasting. And when the licence fee ...”

“... isolation from Western civilisation, and made his journey appear more of an exploration of his own self.) We may accept that the details of Phat Diem or Santiago were observable by anyone who happened to be there, but venture to think that only one writer would have selected them and not others present in the scene, and described them in those words in that ...”