“... seal up his letters ‘because of the servant’. One of the results of the Renaissance habit of self-conscious re-editing of letters is that the printed correspondence of friends often seems less spontaneous than the snipings of enemies: friends had time to tidy things up. But these letters are full of delightful details, not least about the ...”

“... Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the ...”

“... to return home, preferring life in an unhappy succession of old people’s homes, a kind of self-imposed exile, physically debilitated but with all his wits about him, obstinately asserting his independence to the very end. This fixity of purpose has always been evident in his work; it is equally evident in the volume on the Comintern and the Spanish ...”

“... the state was supposed to embody was deeply entrenched; and it was further reinforced in this self-image by Franco, with his persistent references to the Armed Forces as the guardians of the nation against its enemies, which, after the defeat of the Axis, seemed to be just about the entire Western world. Franco eventually passed himself off as an enemy of ...”

“... above a certain quiet tone, which after a while becomes a little predictable and unexciting: never self-conscious and always splendidly in tune with itself, it finally seems too modest, and one wishes that Bowles could have had the nerve to weld his understanding of these people and his fluency with their folktale motifs into a Midnight’s Children of ...”

“... lifts him up high and then casts him down. For instance, he is described as displaying supreme self-confidence in North Africa, so it is disconcerting to find him also described as ‘unsure of himself, hesitant, often depressed, irritable, liable to make snap judgments on insufficient information, defensive in both his mood and his tactics’. At the ...”

“... women wide sloping mounds of fat trembling on the edge, it seemed to me, of indecency, with their self-conscious shrieks of laughter, their hands at each shriek darting to cover their mouths, their little teeth decayed and crooked, and the steaming food they were copiously setting on the table a malodorous double entendre, something which excited them, served ...”

“... humanity, since he has had so little time to meet any of the species. Robert Heinlein’s totally self-indulgent The cat who walks through walls (to be acquitted of malignant sexism only on the ground that it is also so innocently pubescent) has made its author two million dollars so far. The first volume of the new decalogy by ‘Scientology’ Hubbard has ...”

“... this includes the best justification of the role of the judge in that system. This is not only a self-referential but a normative task: the best sense of the law is the sense, relative to the constraints of fit with what is already given, that makes the system the best it could be – best in both fit and substance, balanced against one another in a way ...”

“... the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy filmmaker and self-publicist Neville Dreadberg, whose documentary Blood Orange was imagined as depicting the cannibalistic practices of rank and file Ulster Unionists. In a variant on the traditional Ulster fry-up – and Swift’s Modest Proposal – Wharton described ...”

“... began to relax and enjoy the Nazi regime’s early achievements and the return of national self-confidence. Friends edged away, although Johannes kept in touch with the political victims and Jews in his old circle. (He used to say that his educated Jewish friends were ‘the last Prussians’: ...”

“... contrast, ‘the spirit presiding over the internet is that of an economy of abundance, where the self must choose and maximise its options and is forced to use techniques of cost-benefit and efficiency.’ At first it was exciting but after a couple of months the cracks began to show. What Beauman says about our inability to gauge what might be attractive ...”

“... his heart. Dickens uses exaggeration and bathos to poke fun at the pretensions of narcissistically self-absorbed young men; Baudelaire – just as effectively – uses overblown Gothic. Over his head he notices a sinister cloud that turns out to contain a group of vicious demons that look like cruel, inquisitive dwarves. They gaze at him coldly for a while and ...”

“... Captain Oates’s departure from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition, but Gerald’s taciturn self-erasure seemed more appropriate to my social class and discontents than Oates’s stiff upper lip). I thought that there was nothing at all the matter with having ‘a mind of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I ...”

“... This boy who has no fixed identity gives way quickly to one with a new and very different sense of self: Ascot, 15 October 1881. Saturday. We got to Waterloo at 2 o’clock whence we drove to the Savoy Theatre in a bus to see Patience, a most intensely utter play in the aesthetic line … After the theatre we walked down Piccadilly without a poppy or a lily ...”