“... The word is not accidentally chosen. Direct and home sales in this period employed the rhetoric of self-help, positive thinking and popular religion. (Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional wine salesman Montague Egg, with his upbeat rhyming maxims out of the Salesman’s Handbook, is a good example of the tribe.) Thousands of dealers made the ‘Stanley ...”

“... is awkward in a novel that narrates surreal happenings, Spark’s recourse to a theoretical or self-conscious realism is no solution either. For one thing, it is still a form of realism: we are still asked to believe that characters ‘exist’, that certain things happened to these people, that quotation-marks signify certain lines of speech, and so ...”

“... to a groundless hatred of one’s fellow human beings, and to a profoundly damaging mode of self-hatred. In short, disgust-based law underwrites a disgust with humanity as such. Nussbaum’s analysis of shame is more nuanced; she sees in its cognitive content a potentially affirmative moral and political role. Her account here relies more on ...”

“... Herefordshire hills. I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own. Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s self-portrait in blank verse, was published in 1960. As Hillier puts it, neatly: ‘John’s generation was given to premature ...”

“... place in society in general carried out, as usual among the Stracheys, in a more high-pitched and self-conscious form, was the family’s departure from the monstrous house in Lancaster Gate. Richard Strachey had died in 1908, and the ‘crammed high hideous edifice’ where Lytton had read ‘the riddle of the Victorian age’ among the conversations in the ...”

“... slaughter’. The editors at this point opt for F’s more orthodox Almighty who is opposed to ‘self-slaughter’, and the seals go to’t. Somewhere in all this is a larger perplexity in our thinking about Hamlet, and in our ways of thinking about texts historically. We want a text that is pluralistic and open to infinite reinterpretation, that can be ...”

“... the virtual world out, just as I have done for much of my real life. Though, of course, my fantasy self couldn’t actually read my unreal book because an avatar doesn’t read or do anything, being entirely dependent on the will and brainpower of a real self out here in First Life directing it. I had hopes of there being ...”

“... of the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (a book that was itself accused of a self-directed anti-semitism). To be anti-Hollywood has also, at various times, been a way to enlist the rhetoric of anti-semitism to express sentiments that are anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-New Deal, anti-internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or ...”

“... buoyant one – which compounded even his new comrades’ distrust of him. He seemed to have a self-destructive streak. From early on, we are told, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny, invulnerable to bullets both literally (in his early military adventures) and metaphorically; but that was no reason, surely, to put himself in the path of so many ...”

“... with which he is covertly complicit, he writes scornfully of ‘the indignant diatribes of self-righteous post-colonial censors’, perhaps a necessary disowning of the voguish for a book which includes a chapter devoted to the protuberant buttocks and plump, pendulous or sagging breasts to be found in representations of female savages. Despite these ...”

“... to subvert the unexamined shibboleths of the British state. For the Union of 1707 is far from self-explanatory. The Union of the Parliaments in 1707 followed a century after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the Scottish royal line had succeeded to the English throne. This loose personal union preserved separate Scottish and English kingdoms, which ...”

“... who might be trying to say something that Barnett fails to understand. These episodes are told self-deprecatingly – a narrative of successive misperceptions, the consequences of which are understood only after it is too late. Foreigners, Barnett is telling us in the course of this extended self-criticism, can rarely ...”

“... without ever coming into focus. In a daze of refracted marine light, they find themselves, these self-hypnotised actors, in the same De Chirico painting: interior as exterior. Sleepwalkers sunburned on one side. Magically, they avoid collisions. They float towards no particular destination, with no motive beyond movement itself; a beating of the bounds. The ...”

“... other factor helps to explain why Italy is a country of the centre-right. It is the home of the self-employed, more so than any other country in Europe. Small shops have survived and even prospered in a way that would be quite unimaginable in Northern Europe or North America. Family firms have played the crucial role in the construction of industrial ...”

“... to call Eyre and his officers to account. The imperatives of empire were too potent to admit the self-examination which a prosecution would have involved and the self-doubt which a conviction would have entailed. What the controversy nevertheless exposed and articulated was the deep discomfort among both supporters and ...”