“... from Rebecca West, who trained for the stage – according to her son she remained ‘an incurable self-dramatiser’ – and who took her pen-name from Rosmersholm. But the inarticulacy and dimness are all Sunflower’s own. On the first page of the novel she is being dumb about machinery; on the last page she is seen worrying about her party dress and the ...”

“... narrow individuality and their sense of history. The burgh, the town which is – or was – self-governing as a tiny urban unit and at the same time closely linked to the farming and crofting world of its hinterland, is in many ways the real locus of Scottish history, and also of Scottish imagining and writing. Most fiction which is not patrician in ...”

“... at moments when, by rights, she should simply be scared witless. At several points the writing is self-conscious and obtrusive in just the way that Jennifer Johnston’s isn’t: ‘And so she grieved on and on, the regrets rustling and sleek with life in the undergrowth of her mind, a myriad eyes on myriad worlds.’ Spring Sonata is an odd, fantastical ...”

“... his native Elmet, Dylan Thomas’s half-loved Wales, Hartley’s sexy Norfolk, the Georgians’ self-conscious shires, Housman’s country of the broken heart. Grahame’s pagan Thames Valley and Orwell’s lost Oxfordshire village in Coming Up for Air – ‘one of the most powerful novels ever written about the threat to what we now call the ...”

“... I have no clue – but this disorientation is part of the pleasure of following Reid around his self-created world. Hugo Williams’s Love-Life leaves much to be desired, like most people’s. I like the look of the book, and the illustrations by Jessica Gwynne. Williams himself writes the sort of poetry for which people used to be horribly ragged in ...”

“... Reuben Saidman, who worked for the picture papers that supplied Britain with a serial documentary self-portrait. Their work was often reproduced in the interlocking boxes and circles of composite picture pages, and the catalogue makes a rather heavy-handed comment on the nature of the editorial process by reproducing many of them with their original masking ...”

“... ambition nor the measure of his failure. As genre, this is a kind illustration of the importunate self-advertisement found in young poets. As something more than genre, it reminds us of the long-lived idea that a studious application to high art was always a reliable inspiration. This Mulready learned in the Royal Academy, which he joined early and served ...”

“... Carrie, that he has much idea what the power might be for. All these men are immensely wary and self-conscious, determined not to sell out as fast or as publicly as some other generations. Coppola is trying to bypass the old Hollywood by taking as much control of the process as he can: he has set up a studio, Zoetrope, which he hopes will provide a complete ...”

“... this out of the libraries and into the home. Skip the campaign biographies: they are by definition self-serving, and by tradition footloose with mere fact (Reagan’s 1976 effusion had Britons committing suicide in the queues for National Health Service beds). The red meat, though in highly indigestible form, is here. The candidate’s name is nowhere ...”

“... granted. Men are allowed, indeed conditioned, to deceive themselves to the end, and are loved as self-deceivers. Women have their resource – the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret ‘richness’ of Barbara Pym’s heroines. ‘Richness’ is a favourite word. It ...”

“... and to the whole later story of psychosexual development? How decisive in this connection was his self-analysis, following the death of his father? Neither Ernest Jones nor Mr Clark had the means of answering this question: the available evidence is not sufficient. Mr Clark puts great emphasis on Freud’s determination, from the beginning of his professional ...”

“... Designed as a sequel to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, it was an even more self-indulgent work, almost ignoring the philosophical tendencies and topics which had not greatly attracted my own interest. Nevertheless it has been well received, especially in the United States. An edition in paperback will soon be appearing in both ...”

“... cannot even find a week to take you to New Orleans? Why, when you are so intelligent, explain your self-destructiveness as though nothing was in your control? Why indulge your taste for sitting on rotten boughs and complain when they break beneath you? The abrogation of the conventions which distinguish writer and character spread this tetchiness. Kate’s ...”

“... rush of Tommy Morgan’s speech – a tumble of dialogue and incident – and the stately, more self-aware progress of Joan Poynder’s, in which ‘one’ deflects the possibility of disagreement. As well as a fairly predictable clutch of Cockney ‘aint’s’ and ‘cor blimey’s’, the upper-class liking for capacious derogatory adjectives ...”

“... not distinctly memorable, either for good qualities or bad. They are not posturing, or false, or self-indulgent, or vicious in language: but there is no particular reason why any of them should be read a second time. Why is it that his critical comments, especially the negative ones, stick so much more sharply in the memory? It is not that they are ...”