“... is not perhaps in a better position than they are. ‘Was it not possible that her husband’s self-mutilation had inoculated her, in some sense, to the terrors that would grasp the imaginations of others.’ And within a few short logical paces Mutz has decided that cannibalism is not so bad compared with, say (to cite as he does another gothic moment in ...”

“... gets drunk or can’t get to sleep until dawn, it’s doubly satisfying. Wallander is scrupulously self-questioning, often worrying that in some small way he shares the dark urges behind the crimes he solves. Most of all, he worries about Swedish society, brooding on crime rates and responses to immigration – his own included – while trying to see his work ...”

“... is created; in The Old Crowd (1978), the film crew repeatedly appears in the frame; and If ...’s self-consciousness of its status as a film is put to intelligent (rather than merely clever) use. There is no attempt at naturalism, and the narrative slips between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ so seamlessly that it is impossible to distinguish between ...”

“... or slipping him a few extra excuses for his behaviour. Sean Penn is the guitarist, a breezy, self-admiring fellow whose vanity would be a weakness if it were not his defence against all other, more difficult feelings. He can’t settle down, he tells his women. He’s an artist. He has to move on. Then he moves on once too often, and watches his lifetime ...”

“... he had a strong personality, and was determined to get his own way, is clear. That he was often self-righteous, and sometimes self-deceiving, is difficult to deny. There were many contradictions or at least paradoxes. Stafford Cripps was a man from a background of established wealth and, after he married Isobel, they had ...”

“... And, as you’d suspect, this ridiculous hunger for bogus knowledge comes not from his ‘inner self’, but from his girlfriend Dita (an Ashkenazi Jew): ‘He went/to a left-wing rally with his girlfriend Dita Inbar.’ Oz is at his very worst on the subject of the ‘left-wing rally’. He fails to observe even a rudimentary intellectual decency. He can ...”

“... are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to ...”

“... bellyful’ – but knew his case was far from unique: Wedgwood, Boulton and Watt were all largely self-taught. So, unconcerned by the views of those who looked down both on the provincial and on the novel as a form capable of effecting or even imagining real social change, Bage continually engaged in his fiction in a critique of the world in which he ...”

“... artifice that can be entered only after things have broken down. They are, in short, as self-propelling and potentially dangerous as the sexual fantasies of The Fermata. The Fermata lost Baker a number of fans (‘Goodbye Nicholson Baker, goodbye for ever,’ Victoria Glendinning said). He has been scrambling ever since to recover his accreditation ...”

“... to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality. All we can safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with the savages.’ In The Manchurian Candidate it takes the diabolical Yen Lo ...”

“... double entendre of ‘regarding’ in her title is joined by a third, fainter association, that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag ...”

“... the fragmenting of families and communities, and the traditional American spirit of frontier self-sufficiency. But why did so many people die during those days in Chicago? For one, there are many elderly people in the city who are afraid to answer the door, let alone seek outside help. There are neighbourhoods where social service case-workers try to ...”

“... as democratic levellers. When the girls arrive at Hever Castle, they find another artificial and self-contained environment. They are disturbed by the ghost-crowded aura of the castle (a childhood home of Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here ...”

“... he would be forced to look back on the abandonment of his family with nothing but regret and self-reproach.) Wallace’s title, The View from Here, is a phrase Williams used to capture the contingent and perspectival determinants of our values and commitments. Although Wallace believes that not all practical or value judgments are perspectival in this ...”

“... Lawson. His scholarly background is in Holocaust studies. Instituted, in part, to promote ‘self-reflection’, Holocaust studies are presented in Britain, at least popularly (all those Second World War programmes on the History Channel), as exclusively to do with Germany, and the reflection they reinforce is the old ...”