“... often gains its force from the mixture of motives on the part of the traveller, the blend of self-extinction and self-discovery which is brought on by immersion in alien surroundings. Like the people in his books, the people whose stories he has travelled to tell, Chatwin is a wanderer and an obsessive: it’s this ...”

“... in the Thirties. The novel is dominated by two characters: Sasha Pankratov, the hero, an obvious self-portrait of the author, and Stalin. Thrown out of the institute in which he is studying for his part in composing a seditious number of a wall newspaper – it contains not a single mention of Comrade Stalin – Pankratov is then suspected of involvement in ...”

“... these characters are victimised and essentially innocent, and it is Ahab, mutilated, vengeful and self-enslaved, who is the book’s true monster. Dickens also employs the myth in its original secular form, as a contest between the classes in a post-revolutionary, post-industrial world. ‘As the poetic justice of Dickens’s plots so often implies, monsters ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In paying for the favours of Heinrich, Joachim has ‘subsidised the mirror image of his darkest self’ – his ‘wicked, sensual, animal existence’. Perhaps he drove Heinrich into a position where he had no choice but to ‘sink down into the anonymous mass of his fellow evil-doers – the storm-troopers’. The problem is compounded by Joachim’s own ...”

“... of the psychoanalytic theory built around it, is itself a form of family romance, a potentially self-aggrandising allusion to the two ancient but unmythological people who happen to be one’s parents. As Roith writes, referring to the precursor of her own book, Marine Robert’s From Oedipus to Moses, ‘the primordial murdered father in Freud’s Oedipean ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hear of pre-historic man.’ Such a passage obviously could not be written today. We are far too self-conscious and guilty about our ethnocentrism ever to admit to such a reaction even if we had it. The word ‘savage’ alone would be beyond the pale, more embarrassing than any four-letter word. Under the severe tutelage of anthropologists and in the long ...”

“... of Eden belonged to the tragedy of the peasantry in the 19th century. The family farm in Wyre was self-sufficient, they ate bannocks, butter, cheese and milk made by themselves from their own fields and their own animals, they sent the wool from their own sheep to a Border town to be made up into clothes, and they ate so much crab and lobster from the sea ...”

“... a writer ... do something useful ... Go back and be a publisher.’ The advice was brutal, and self-serving in effect, but it was right; and Pound backed it up by offering the names of writers Laughlin could help. New Directions (or ‘Nude Erections’ as Pound preferred to call it) was born. By 1936, when its first anthology was published, the names of ...”

“... 55 hours a week over a 48-week year strains credulity), but the greater part of that work is self-imposed – and not universally. In the past universities have gone easy on the drones who hived with them, regarding their delinquency as the price to be paid for the autonomy of the self-disciplined many. No novel, play ...”

“... turned down films that didn’t include Tracy because she was afraid of his ‘capacity for self-destruction’ when left on his own. Leaming’s research is extensive and thorough, and all sources are acknowledged. She gives precise dates for all of Hepburn’s movements, and although we know where she was every day of every year, this means that our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... More than culture or class conflict, war reached the people and compelled them to acts of self-sacrifice based on patriotic identification with country and government. ‘War is the health of the State,’ declared Bourne, disillusioned that the masses did not rise up in resistance. In the Twenties, the French writer Julien Benda continued this ...”

“... or at any rate made it plausible to claim – that independent-minded peasants and tradesmen, self-enriching and assertive, would shortly undermine all the Bolsheviks stood for. Plans were laid against the impending counter-revolution: hideous, impossible goals were set. Within five years, agriculture was to be collectivised and a massive industrial base ...”