“... create an Englishman of the Imperial decadence, a contemplative aesthete, incapable of action, who self-consciously reflects the mood of an inglorious period of English history. ‘Peterley [the house] seems now to be merely the symbol of an England that is lost for ever,’ Mr Pennington makes David Peterley write before casting off for Australia early in ...”

“... is not their intentional pastiche, their craven imitation of a style. Although the term ‘self-parody’ is in common use, ‘self-pastiche’ for some reason is not – but many artists who develop an original style early in life spend much of their careers creating works that would be considered pastiche if ...”

“... critics and anthropologists, the orientalists continue to exhibit an almost complete lack of self-consciousness about the methodology of their field, its ‘knowability’ and the purposes to which their knowledge (which can only consist of interpretation) may be put. This he attributes to two factors: the marginality, or ‘willed irrelevance’, of ...”

“... at the Royal College of Music before the war – that Gurney was unteachable. For all his charming self-deprecations, Gurney was, before and during the war and after it, wilful, headstrong. And this, though it just may have been the precondition of his achieving what he did, seems to have prolonged his apprenticeship to the point where the strain of it broke a ...”

“... war, and, when his own kind of autobiography went into print, though its roots were in a richly self-pitying epoch, it was entirely free from that element. To what extent Brooke returned from the war to an accumulation of notes for books is not clear, but the fact that his eventual output included 15 works published – some separated by only a few months ...”

“... of how seriousness is being sacrified to trivialisation, and consequently with a more strident self-righteousness. But Manichean explanations are otiose. The Grub Street jobbing editor not only doesn’t see anything awful about being slipshod, he doesn’t see anything slipshod about being slipshod. He isn’t transgressing his standards. Those are his ...”

“... Mary Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Mew, her poetry gets on with itself, not self-absorbed but quite independent. Men poets, it makes one feel, get together too much, have too much of an eye for each other’s points and failings; and women have not shared in this tradition, with its complex rituals of amour propre. One consequence is ...”

“... his own energy:                        Only through the hard Shaft-face of self-esteem parsimonious tears Are oozing, sour distillate from the core Of iron shame, the shame of private failure Shown up by the completeness of the dead. I wrote in the fierce hope of bursting loose From this regime, cracking its discipline … I ...”

“... him better than an Englishwoman, but might also be able to galvanise him with her energy and self-confidence as well as her humanity and sense. Perhaps his turning to Elizabeth was the result of homesickness, or just the reflex of a somewhat Boswellian desire to imitate more assured male friends, such as his old friend William Robertson, now a successful ...”

“... he writes, ‘employ no particular language at all: rather an odd mix of the bookish and the self-consciously demotic, a strange hybrid that lives nowhere off the page (nor frequently indeed even on the page)’. They ‘convert a lively and fast-flowing original into something much more plodding, formal and prolix, keeping Dante, as a venerable ...”

“... so on. Writing and reading became as confused and mixed up as sense and nonsense, male and female, self and other, the sexual and the political. Writing about Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath , Kathy Acker commented on its nihilism, as she saw it: ‘The sexual is the political realm. There is no engagement.’ Barbara Kruger paid outrageous ...”

“... dark talk of strategic competition, but China and the US agreed a trade deal.As 2020 began, the self-confidence of the technocrats remained intact. The chief preoccupation in Europe wasn’t the immediate economic situation, but the possibility of striking a new Green Deal. Climate change and the energy transition were a huge, urgent challenge that would ...”

“... held its ground so successfully that it was able, ultimately, to transform Buddhism from a self-centred faith into a doctrine of brotherhood, dedicated to good works and open to lay believers (including women). It also managed to convert Daoism, with its critiques of organised ritual, into another bureaucratised religion.The early eighth century, five ...”

“... a strong impression, which I tried to catch in a diary I kept back then:A thin, nervous woman, self-protective in manner – legs tightly crossed, arms hugging herself, down and back in her chair as if trying to shrink behind a cushion. Her voice was quiet, words deliberate. Occasional panic seemed to sweep over her and she would violently begin to spin a ...”

“... exploited before in fiction, in Pale Fire above all, where the deranged Kinbote smothers with his self-obsessed commentary the poem he imagines he is serving. Here the situation is different. The annotator is also the novelist, who has somehow become separated from the novel he meant to write, or ‘excavate’, as if it existed already in every detail, and ...”