“... whom Nathan overhears in the night trying to seduce or re-seduce the writer, and Lonoff’s self-effacing, depressed, bitter wife, who twice makes a scene in front of the young guest. The surface quality, partly naked and partly inscrutable, of such a domestic mess as it presents itself to an outsider is very truly registered. And there is excellent ...”

“... reproducing the means of life to producing predominantly goods of symbolic value for expressive self-presentational purposes.’ So we may apply the analogy of semantics in order to understand societies. We shall find the meanings of social actions and speeches by looking for what Austin called their performative and illocutionary functions. The things that ...”

“... one journey abroad, a Classical education and the experience of Scotland in its greatest days of self-esteem, when it could be believed that the answers to the social and moral problems of the new world of steam power and voting power might well be found there – all these enabled him not so much to transcend his geographical limitations as to use them as a ...”

“... The Sense of an Ending, but has no difficulty whatever in demonstrating that it is often naive and self-contradictory. In his long struggle for an intelligent view of realism, of language and especially literary language as intimately related to the world we live in, he has developed formidable machinery and uses it with gusto and learning. Why then a certain ...”

“... Saif says. One doesn’t at all, however, feel that all this is just more of the old modern self-referentiality and so forth: the novel is actually interested in the ways in which it can contain a life, and also various ways of life; and it is part of its substance that Asyah struggles with the narrative of her own life, imposing upon her own history ...”

“... about psychoanalysis and the significance of its history. Given that ambivalence, and therefore self-doubt, are integral to the theory, it is remarkable how unwilling psychoanalysts have been to write anything about their hatred, or their love, of psychoanalysis. It would be particularly interesting for those who love psychoanalysis to tell us their ...”

“... in his ‘theatrical’ films of the mid-Fifties, addresses this condition of film with great self-irony.) Rushdie also unjustly dismisses the dream source of Dorothy’s Oz: ‘The film, like the TV soap opera Dallas, introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows’ – from Dorothy’s being knocked ...”

“... blames the collapse of Communism on the strength of the American dollar and on Gorbachev, the ‘self-important fool’ with ‘birdshit on his head’ who got into bed with Reagan and Bush. His one remaining hero is the late Nicolae Ceausescu, a ‘mad hog’ no doubt, but ‘at least he had a bit of spine’ when his former henchmen turned against him. For ...”

“... encouraging any such trace on the reader’s face is even more so. Any sneers that do arise are self-induced, the product of an ideology considerably meaner than the expedition’s. Captain ‘Titus’ Oates is afraid to remove his sock lest his gangrened toes come with it. ‘Do you reckon a man without feet could still ride to hounds?’ he jokes, and is ...”

“... have been deployed; but Keynesian remedies dismissed – whilst markets have been denied any self-stabilising properties. The book is a bran tub of pessimism. For most outsiders, this is of little import, and one set of doom merchants must be much like another. But this is not the case. For Rees-Mogg and Davidson have a great rival in peddling doom, one ...”

“... Which also explains why Ismail Kadare is big in Italy and France (where he has lived in semi-self-imposed exile since 1990. The blurb says that he now divides his time between Paris and Tirana). Besides, it is unfair to judge his work in double translation: the English versions of his novels have been translated from translations into French by the ...”

“... would recount the story of the midnight confrontation with Profumo always in a shoulder-shrugging, self-mocking way: ‘My contribution was to type the statement.’ This was in character, for those who knew him better than I at the Telegraph claim that Deedes was inclined to run away from hard decisions of any sort. He seems to have the capacity both to ...”

“... why the world hates us.’ Rebel is based on Morgan’s childhood diaries, and is written in a self-consciously naive style. In the childhood chapters (the action pings back and forth between her new life in London and her old life in the cult) she refers to her parents as ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’. The effect is disquieting. As the book goes on, the two ...”

“... is some misogyny in this: it’s hard to believe that Hemingway and Pound were docile and self-effacing; in any case, Stein and Beasley had their reasons for being prickly.) The frankness of the account and the timing of its publication – between the scandals of Ulysses in 1922 and the appearance of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of ...”

“... slammed in their faces. Indoors, meanwhile, guilt began eating away at the stingy householder’s self-justification, which, if followed by misfortune, might be expiated by the conviction that he or she was the victim of magical vengeance. Even today, my Yorkshire friend’s robustly rational partner admits that her kindness towards their travelling visitor ...”