“... was akin to Anne Radcliffe, and she was born out of due time. All these people were segregated in self-conscious little groups. In London on more than one occasion in the Thirties, Virginia Woolf reported conversations with Tony Butts, friend of William Plomer and brother of Mary, about his sister. She is a bad woman – pretentious – I can see no merit ...”

“... with the life of the amateur artist and her growing contempt for the pretensions and self-deceptions of those who practised it. St Louis was crawling with would-be lady writers. There was Mrs Stone, the director of the Modern Novel Club, who had written a pamphlet on ‘The Problem of Domestic Service’: ‘Intentions pile up before her like a ...”

“... in a ‘psychophysical evolution towards androgyny’, a change in which his lipsticked self is playing a part. He seems to be striking a series of attitudes rather than expressing opinions permanently held, his most genuine belief perhaps being that when he performed poetry readings ‘stripped to a black leather or satin posing-pouch’, the poems ...”

“... energy, and Isaac Julien knows how to get images to ask difficult questions. The acting is rather self-conscious, but its awkwardness has charm, and individual performers, particularly Valentine Nonyela, Mo Sesay, Sophie Okonedo and Jason Durr, are appealing as persons:or rather, not quite as persons, but as interesting, hesitant phantoms, caught between ...”

“... we began with maximum information of the occurrence of events and ended with minimum, and this is self-contradictory... the order of our individual time is the order of our awareness, that is, of the growth in our information of what occurs. By definition, an event which leaves a ‘trace’ of its occurrence is in the past ... there is no such thing as a ...”

“... have the effect of great candour, while Burgess’s ‘confessions’ somehow sound like self-congratulation even when he is showing himself a loser. A fight with a young bald-headed Irish navvy ends with him seeming a kind of hero, though it eventually costs him his four bottom incisors. When he is invited to spend a year at CCNY as Distinguished ...”

“... one of reciprocity; authorising or retrieving the mother is a form of authorising the autonomous self. Feminist academic biographers have written with honesty and humour about their strong identification with their female subjects, and their need to separate, evaluate and detach. For some, the process is even marked by guilty dreams. Charlotte Goodman ...”

“... of animal and plant, how they arise, and how and why they become extinct. Biologists are given to self-congratulation – and have a lot to congratulate themselves about. After all, they already know all the interesting things about genetics, and soon may even understand something about evolution and animal behaviour. There is, however, a secret about modern ...”

“... of one’s own youth’s brilliance, and the more general sadness of the unknowable generations of self-stifled and closeted poets that preceded our outspoken time, and then, too, the simple asexual unattainability of much of what we really want and the unretrievability of what we best remember, are some of the emotions toward which Hollinghurst shepherds ...”

“... by three lewd aunts and a brass band. An alternative commentary is provided by a gullible and self-important policeman, who, in the middle of the mayhem, announces his eagerness to chase after illegal importers of ‘French panties and English marmite’. This character is at times too much of a clown, with his droll delivery – his wife, having been ...”

“... all have their place. Most petitioners presented the killings as justifiable – perpetrated in self-defence or under severe provocation – or else accidental. Under French law, it was immaterial whether a death was involuntary or deliberate: no conceptual distinction between the two was made in law. Presenting a letter of remission was one of the few ...”

“... are about German cities, and both interweave threads of personal and political experience – more self-consciously, it’s true, than the Angus Calder piece, but still without posturing or having to force the point. Carol Rumens’s ‘Munich’ speaks in clipped, articulate lines which leave the poem’s feelings truthfully unresolved but never vague: She ...”

“... human ingenuity discovers almost by accident in the course of its asinine craze for diversion and self-deception. The experienced reader will see at once what motif has been made use of here – one that used often to be encountered in ghost stories. Those on the quest, sleeping in the haunted house or whatever, are doing it for fun: but beyond all the ...”

“... The only way that could be imagined for getting out more energy than was put in was to induce a self-sustaining reaction in a mass of deuterium gas. This would happen if the gas could be raised to a very high temperature, where all the deuterons would be moving so fast that they would occasionally bang together with enough energy to fuse. Crowd the ladies ...”

“... of the neck, and become the measure by which all the rest is found wanting. They confirm for the self-doubting reader that it is not he but the novelist whose batteries have needed recharging. Stories are commonly designed to make us hope for a particular ending; sometimes our wish is granted, sometimes not – either outcome, the happy or the sad, is ...”