“... she knew or living the life that she led. About herself she’s quite reticent: not only not self-important, but not in the least introspective – her way of indicating a bad moment is to say that she can’t remember what she had for her supper that night. And in that sense she was right not to have described this as an autobiographical novel. As for ...”

“... are taking power now. Tim Garton Ash listed some of these: a belief in civil society – ‘social self-organisation’ – at the expense of the state, non-violence, the notion that peace without democratic freedoms is no peace. He might have added to this list: faith in the market economy, with the pious hope that the market will prove compatible with ...”

“... employs the stream of consciousness (‘Horrid stream!’ as Lawrence said), and probes the self. Best of all, she writes for an élite (unlike Dickens): ‘we cannot usefully judge her fiction by any ideological standards of readability.’ It is difficult to assess in translation the kind of writing that must depend for its success on verbal ...”

“... inauthenticity. The front is now occupied by the former back-stage anthropology of fieldworkers’ self-questioning commentary, and their letters and diaries. An interesting comment on the current vein by Clifford Geertz* demonstrates why writing whose first aim is to explore consciousness is unsuited for sending messages. Marilyn Strathern actually has got ...”

“... strangeness’ for Wyeth’s Farm Road, a picture in which Wyeth practises an ordinance of self-denial – and is followed by Updike. In Farm Road, the fully clothed Helga is a different kind of bust, a head and shoulders seen from behind. Her plaited and parted hair is echoed by a clump of trees on the top of a steep hill. Her coat and the hill are ...”

“... it can be called that, digs a traditional grave for women. It mires them in Nature: ‘To acquire self-knowledge of their own womanhood in a way that is separate from their motherhood seems to many women a luxury that is impossible to achieve, perhaps because both their minds and their bodies are so much more involved than would be the case for men.’ It is ...”

“... cabinet craftsman like Tolkien, who took years over the elaborate pedigrees and provenance of his self-contained Elfland. But in fact neither had any real feeling for language, and no more had Priestley: which makes one wonder whether popularity may not be associated with taking communication for granted, not making a style of one’s own, but using a common ...”

“... in the centre of a group of five Winchester scholars. Grave and gowned, he looks out with supreme self-confidence at a world he quite clearly expects to conquer. He is the epitome of the smooth and polished Wykehamist. But if that was what Crossman was in 1937, it was only part of what he was. Besides his fellowship at New College, which could easily have ...”

“... Security and Armed Forces and can govern by decree. To do so, however, the head of state must be a self-confident and energetic figure. Yeltsin is exhausted, has had two heart attacks of unknown severity and is prone to disabling depression. He is famously pneumatic, but his five years of office have seen a steady decline in his powers. Energy and ...”

“... resigning in furious opposition to the very principle of popular consultation by referendum. This self-conscious wish to stand apart from the hoi polloi linked up with the sociology of meritocratic ascent. ‘Even when I disagreed with them,’ one SDP MP said to the authors, ‘I used to think of the people at Labour Party Conferences as my people. Then, a ...”

“... them to learn from the errors of the past. Fidel’s speeches became the only permitted source of self-criticism or policy revision, and he was a past master at covering up inconsistencies with rhetoric. However dazzling his argument, however deeply his listeners wished to help him build his utopia, the structures were never in place to enable him to do ...”

“... the evocation of impossibility. Much else besides, no doubt. At times Marías’s images take on a self-consciously Proustian flavour, the sense of a homage to the master of the exfoliating, multiple-choice analogy. Perhaps she was crying too because she felt the kind of envy or sense of exile that afflicts children when they are separated from their ...”

“... automobile that takes us where we wish to go’ – which will be cheap because they are self-reproducing. Probably, ‘the self-reproducing machine will be partly made of genes and enzymes.’ During the next thousand years ‘we must expect’ that ‘collective memory and collective consciousness’ made ...”

“... of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering ...”

“... was soon to be both heavy and clumsy. The Mirror was saved financially but sadly disfigured by his self-promotion and promises of vast wealth for the readers: assuredly, he lacked the newspaper sense of a Beaverbrook. At least he was against any proliferation of nipples. The new broom had his principles and had given evidence against the publishers of Last ...”