“... Fowler) and not for his work as a lexicographer. Fowler is the sacred text of the linguistically self-conscious. McMorris quotes a distinguished judge who ‘had been kept from his bed by it “to a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing”’. A.J.P. Taylor read the whole thing at least once a year, and ranked it as ...”

“... mused when, in the film’s opening sequence, Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s ‘real’ teenage self, missed the school bus. In that one remark the child encapsulated what the director and producers had got so right in casting Tobey Maguire as the misfit character, and in their gentle faithfulness throughout to the homely tone of the 1960s Spider-Man ...”

“... of Death, offers a more sinister vision of the ethics business, depicting bioethicists as a self-appointed corps of elite liberals plotting to take control of the American medical and judicial systems. Critical essays and editorials have recently appeared in magazines such as Wired, the Scientist, Commentary, the Weekly Standard and First Things ...”

“... like, after spiders and football, is sharing. I was mortified, at having been suckered into a self-help group, after the considerable trouble I have taken in my life to avoid them. Sharing does the same visceral thing to me that happens when your mother pushes you forward at a party to sing a song. Nor did I need to be told that spiders didn’t want to ...”

“... life isn’t a parable. Musa is p0ssessed by a destructive desire to consume the world, Jesus by a self-destructive desire to repudiate it. But between these two extremes, in the wide wilderness between the saint and the devil, the other five characters need to negotiate an acceptable, or at least tolerable, way to live and coexist. In an earlier novel, his ...”

“... had it, a ‘cowardly’ act against ‘the free world’ but ‘an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions’. She notes the announcement that grieving centres were in operation and abhors the complicity of government and press to evade any analysis of ‘the colossal ...”

“... be faithful to the way the world was: the universe itself, he believed, was a set of endless, self-enclosed cycles, which his own art mirrored in its very narcissism. And this, perhaps, is where the trouble with his daughter, Lucia, began. For if Joyce’s art was concerned with nothing but itself, neither in some respects was he. Joyce was an author in ...”

“... ocean of morphological possibility are natural selection, historical contingency and the laws of self-assembly and self-organisation. Butterflies with wingspans the size of tennis courts or mammals that lack respiratory systems are destined for the Zoo of Unrealisable Creatures. Evolution observes constraints. Some of ...”

“... in A History of the World are underpowered. But the only other major drawback is Barnes’s self-consciously whimsical humour, which might work in his journalism but often seems ingratiating between even soft covers. He has a particular weakness for jocular circumlocutions, bedecked – because novelists are supposed to be specific? – with zany ...”

“... wrote in a tongue which was only ambiguously their own meant that they used it with the sort of self-consciousness which lends itself to Modernism. Because they were less hidebound than the English by the cultural pieties which the language sedimented, they were freer to take liberties with it. Colonial writers usually have more than one tradition to write ...”

“... than the false ornamentations, the stifling social dishonesties of the censored, conformist, self-deceived world of the last of the Kaisers und Königs. The results were certainly disconcerting. F.R. Leavis recounted in his memoir a number of examples of what one might take to be Wittgenstein’s rudeness and arrogance, yet Leavis was careful to say that ...”

“... Loi Taubira has at times been absurdly parochial, a combination of French obstinacy, pomposity and self-flagellation. In 2006, after the repeal of a law that had alluded to the ‘positive effects’ of colonisation, a group of deputies from Jacques Chirac’s ruling party unsuccessfully demanded the repeal of the Loi Taubira’s second article in the name of ...”

“... Literature, A History of English Prosody, The English Novel, A History of the French Novel and, self-referentially, books about books about books – A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, A History of English Criticism. In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was the supreme arbiter of literary ...”

“... film of the Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight, in which Charles Boyer drives Ingrid Bergman mad with self-doubt through devious manipulations that include the gradual damping-down of the gaslight lamps in their marital home. Use of the accusation might tend to exculpate the accused, since anyone capable of applying it is surely better equipped than Bergman to ...”

“... to know yet cannot not know, something that must be disavowed, save in the secret closet of the self.Characters caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s ...”