“... and when she dies she is transmuted by Soueif into an object of reflection and reminiscence for a self-conscious narrator. This last gesture isn’t very convincing, as if the author had decided that she couldn’t leave Aisha to descriptive realism but at the last minute had to point out the presence of a significant narrative process. Fortunately, this bit ...”

“... therapeutic, and meant that you could make it all end happily. The resulting book was morbid and self-indulgent, but I was, this time, shattered when it was rejected by all of six publishers. One could say that the good fortune of the moment was that the money ran out, and I had, finally, to consider the dreaded step of becoming professional in order to keep ...”

“... late Sixties in order to record and illustrate what he calls ‘the professional transformation of self’. He presents a disturbing picture of the process of indoctrination. The trainee physician, educated in the mould of a traditional medical school with its strong biological approach to disease, finds himself confronted by patients whose disorders cannot be ...”

“... everything. The earlier ones are sharper, more wittily observant of the astringencies and self-contradictions of the Scottish character. Yet even when he is at his most astringent the affection shows through. Some of the Scottish essays are simply evocations of a landscape, others are simply presentations of an idiosyncratic character. They have the ...”

“... Gaitskell’s death. It is a sweet moment for those of us who followed him. It would, however, be self-indulgent to savour it for too long. Hillhead has consolidated Jenkins’s claims to lead the SDP and the Alliance. It has not determined what sort of party the SDP is to be, or what strategy the Alliance is to follow. Since the launch of the party a year ...”

“... tough, awkward youth, full of strong feelings and resentments, but he possessed a basic self-confidence rooted in a total acceptance of who and what he was. As a fighter, he was sometimes frightened, and he makes no bones about it. He was one of those detailed to kill British agents in their homes in the original Bloody Sunday of November 1920. In ...”

“... claims of chemotherapists and immunotherapists. The book is highly personal in tone with repeated, self-congratulatory references to Dr Israel’s own work and to that of his colleagues and friends. The language is often imprecise and the arguments ill-ordered, and it is difficult to agree with Susan Sontag’s statement on the front cover that it is ‘by far ...”

“... combining the commonplace idea of the cannibalising of life by art with the idea of his physically self-consuming life as a writer. In 1906 he wrote to his brother Stanislaus: ‘Wurrak is more dissipating than dissipation.’ The two were, for him, intimately connected. The Rolling Stone assignment brought with it its own threat of physical dissipation for ...”

“... and who formed the backbone of Edgbaston society, cultivated education and the arts in their own self-conscious way, and developed an ethos which was often in deliberate contradiction to that of the class of Lord Calthorpe, the landlord who had made it all possible. The high noon of Victorian prosperity, which was also the golden age of Edgbaston, saw the ...”

“... Rockefeller. Apart from politics, religion seems to get the best showing. A spiritual life of self-abnegnation is on the face of it a paradoxical means of acquiring fame, but the two French girls, Bernadette (‘shy, reticent, frail and poor’) and Thérèse of Lisieux (‘natural holiness – a conscious attempt to reach the ideals of ...”

“... of Mannerist ideals. But for a Venetian it was a logical development of traditional concerns, a self-confident response to an alien fashion. This interpretation implies that painters in Venice were able to think about what they were doing in a rather sophisticated way. It is generally assumed, however, that they were an unintellectual lot – inspired but ...”

“... magic may have declined, what a magical word ‘revolution’ is. In a more or less stable but self-critical modern culture it is pregnant with easy excitement, and Hill conjures with it as with the philosopher’s stone, thus gilding his cloudily ambitious claims. But discussion of the intellectual influence of 1640-60 depends on the character that is ...”

“... reasoning, and who are therefore incapable of tracing morality to its source in reasonable self-interest. Religion deserves toleration, when it is tolerant itself. Mr Delahunty’s monograph is similar in its aims to Jonathan Bennett’s recent A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics: both books examine Spinoza’s principal arguments in the spirit of ...”

“... among the least vivid and successful. Each of the book’s chapters has the inner structure of a self-contained story, or anecdote, and in those dealing with the post-war period the threads are pulled together in a more commanding way, moving to a climax in which, in the second-to-last episode, a figure from the past, a former inspector of the laboratory at ...”

“... individual and public interest’ is brought about by ‘competitive markets and pursuit of self-interest by individuals’. Interestingly, a much smaller proportion of Conservative MPs accepted this claim; and among economists, business economists were more sceptical of it than others. Sen, while not denying all the often-praised virtues of the market ...”