“... was the beneficiary of the new apprehension of New York as a gorgeously set stage for the modern self. Only the previous year, a French refugee painter had pronounced the city the capital of the modern world – quite a judgment coming from a Parisian. The idea of New York as a city of lyrical modernity, a running metropolitan romance, was in large measure ...”

“... Cat on a fence I’ll kiss it – always, always, I will – didn’t I?’ His nearly final word, self-directed, is: ‘Stupstraight’. Julia Kristeva might call Helfgott’s way with words ‘semiotic’. Richard Alleva, in Commonweal, calls him ‘a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings and surreal wordplays ...”

“... to. Branches were to be independent, but were expected to uphold the principles of democracy, self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Andrews lists the official objectives of the organisation: ‘1) stimulating interest in the agricultural industry 2) developing co-operative industries 3) encouraging home and local ...”

“... penetration (this, at least, was Dalí’s story, for what it is worth). Compared with the bogus self-promotion of his later years, Dalí’s posturing in those early days, though often offensive, could still be excused as a sort of advanced anti-bourgeois rebelliousness, but one is still hard put to understand why Lorca was so besotted with him, unless one ...”

“... of the discovery of DNA, in which she had played a crucial part. James Watson’s outrageously self-heroising Double Helix systematically ridiculed and patronised ‘Rosy’s’ contributions to the work (‘Rosy’, needless to say, was a diminutive she never used herself), while at the same time portraying her as ...”

“... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...”

“... recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against whatever he sees as the conventional wisdom – or, worse still, the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think ...”

“... might entail Vikram Seth being least like himself when he is most like ‘Vikram Seth’). The self-portrait of Michael as a lonely man, blocked in his development by his attachment to his own depressive states, is the main imaginative achievement of An Equal Music. The best writing in the novel is devoted to articulating Michael’s solitary perceptions ...”

“... the House of Apollo irritatingly appears throughout as the House of ‘Apolline’). For all its self-confessed provisionality, it is by far the best modern account of Pompeii as a historical city: indeed, the best account, more generally, of the visual and architectural impact of Roman power on the face of a medium-sized(?) Italian community in the late ...”

“... Whigs. The colour has faded from much of this polemic but what still shines out is the stunning self-possession and cultural arrogance of the Blackwood wits, who took 17 Princes Street for the centre of the literary universe. The review of Biographia Literaria dismissed Coleridge as an ‘obscure name in English literature’ on the grounds that, though he ...”

“... hard on moral offences relating to prostitution and drunkenness. And there also emerged the self-employed ‘thief-catcher’ – the most celebrated was Jonathan Wild, immortalised by Fielding. Such self-appointed sleuths cashed in on the lavish Parliamentary rewards newly offered for those bringing successful ...”

“... novels, is ultimately immutable, and Flanagan’s heroes reserve their bitterest scorn for the self-interested purveyors of the ‘necessary, sustaining lie’. Flanagan’s latest novel is a work of a different order of ambition, and its approach is at once more playful and more pessimistic. The narrative is circular, but this time its significance is ...”

“... Again, what do all these men see in this guy? Obviously for some it’s a sharing of financial self-interest; for others it’s a relief that a good ol’ boy can still be elected President; for others it’s the moral mumbo-jumbo about ‘integrity in the White House’ that does the trick. Maybe also at work is the ‘Harold Carswell factor’, which I ...”

“... 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 ...”