“... That it has fallen into such disuse is a measure of the extent to which the art world has become self-enclosed. Aesthetes tend not to own country shoes at the best of times: they are an urban breed, disdainful of even a smattering acquaintance with the labelled minutiae of that other environment. Nevertheless there are encouraging signs that the situation is ...”

“... themselves put pen to paper – until the publication in ten years’ time of a spate of works of self-justification: Not One of Us by Lady Grantham, Going Down with the Ship by Sir Ian Gilmour, The Non-Playing Captain of the Wets by Lord Whitelaw and The Broken Reed by Messrs Sherman and Strauss. We shall have to wait until Willie tells the story of his ...”

“... he knows that ‘reform eugenics’ contained class-dependent bias, that it may even have been self-deluding. Yet his account of post-Penrosian genetics, as in the work of R. A. Fisher, errs on the side of naivety; and not everyone will agree with him about the amount of degenerationist thinking that lingered in the scientific work of the 1930s. He is, for ...”

“... which fill their heads, whatever they may be, will seem as implausibly grandiose and as deviously self-serving as those of Rhodes do today. We can also be pretty sure that whatever may have kept the delegates busy that Saturday afternoon, it had not been a visit to the Rhodes ...”

“... with a suggestion of manic-depression, ruthlessness, truculence, offensiveness and ‘a genius for self-advertisement’. He even has a go at Godwin’s erratic spelling. On the credit side he admits that Godwin had an instinct wholly his own for literary quality and, grudgingly, was ‘a brilliant editor; though such things are difficult to measure, it is at ...”

“... Part of Grimond’s appeal as a politician has always been his complete freedom from pomposity and self-importance. This is well illustrated by an anecdote about Attlee: Whenever I hear the words ‘status’ or ‘prestige’ I reach for my gun. I once attended a banquet at which Mr Attlee, after he had ceased to be Prime Minister, was present in full ...”

“... inquisitive by nature’; ‘like so many talkative people ... Pandolfo must have felt pleasantly self-important.’ Similarly, when the action threatens to flag, Cipolla stokes it up again by imaginative use of dramatic hyperbole, generally of the Mills and Boon variety: ‘He had not slept at all during the night and now in less than 24 hours he had ...”

“... were very great, and there was much hysteria to match the heroism, personal greed as well as self-sacrifice. The mere possession of a German name was enough to convict anyone of shining lights at night to guide the raiders, while the services of men like Prince Louis of Battenberg, who had been naturalised for half a century and personally gave the order ...”

“... by Sara Maitland as ‘alive and well and rampaging inside me ... the wild Father inside my own self’. (I am not sure whether this is Jungian orthodoxy or a Freudian slip. I rather think it manages to be both.) This politicisation of one’s genetic disposition will lead to extremes of radical explanation that can surely never attain universal ...”

“... when looking on a Lost City. The reader will quickly learn to make allowances for her powers of self-dramatisation and also for her capacity to detect, as she thinks, signs of tension in others (she has a history of ‘nerves’ and breakdowns). When the war begins she remembers the young sailors she saw in Barrow at the time of Munich. They all had such a ...”

“... media, but quotes approvingly the hostile reaction to this by Commissioner McNee and that tireless self-publicist Chief Constable Anderton. A headline of undisclosed provenance, ‘Police Kill 274,’ is used as though it was typical of the media coverage of the controversy about deaths in police custody. The subsequent findings of the Home Affairs Select ...”

“... Pratt’s own story to recede and the novel to turn in on itself: so much is it concerned with the self-contained world of images in themselves that all reality runs out of it – the case of a novel taken over by its subject. The Mosquito Coast has the pattern of a marvellous journey round a country and a character: but it’s not a myth, a fable or a ...”

“... characters’ own consciousness. Beneath a deceptively artless manner these tales are immensely self-conscious. Most English or French novelists write with an unspoken confidence that their own cross-section of humanity can stand well enough for the whole. Updike, in common with most American writers, is acutely aware that this is America, in the fourth ...”

“... Retrospect’ in The Modern Churchman), that he could not have ‘brought himself to the necessary self-exposure; nor did he aim at accommodating his views to those of others ... He was not made that way. Compromise or concession to majority views were not for him.’ One is bound to contrast the temper of other prophets of the same generation (and what giants ...”

“... suspect that it is ‘an image of a place or condition they wished one day to arrive at, in full self-possession’. This belief renders the poet’s function pretty obscure. To credit the intuitive writer, as Redgrove seems to, with intuitive physical powers seems both sentimental and negative. It is as though a poet were no more than a dowser or ...”