“... she feels and fears’. Why is she so often angry? Because ‘only then does she regain the self-esteem she was not granted in the cradle.’ Why is she so impatient? Because as a baby she couldn’t be confident that the good breast would soon return. What can’t be explained by the breast can be explained by the pot. Why does she make such a virtue ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... must have felt a forlorn affection for the pair, but had no confidence in their wider appeal. Self-confidence was Joyce’s speciality, however. Whatever he wrote was quite sure of its reception, like a king in disguise: the details of his own life had the same mesmeric authority for early readers as the scraps from books read by Eliot have for readers of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Macmillan described its attitude as a ‘fragile and insubstantial screen of complacency and self-deception, skilfully designed to delude a whole people into a fictitious sense of security’. Plus ça change. In fact public opinion was displaying not only a troubled volatility but also what we now regard as the start of a decisive swing against Munich ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... conversation (or a committee) with a group of men: that combination of disdain for the loathsome self-display of the preening, talking male and grudging admiration for the obvious effectiveness of that style of discourse, for the fact that people really do stop and listen. It is not an entirely new analysis, of course – by no means as ...”

“... all the arguments about disapproval of the system not being a reason not to participate in it, the self-importance implied by renunciation, the need for people not affiliated to a political party to contribute their expertise, and so forth. Just what my own expertise might consist in I’m somewhat at a loss to say, although I do have a powerful maiden speech ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... believe. John Rothenstein, giving high praise to the early paintings including the splendid 1914 self-portrait that provides a cover for the biography, said much of the later work gave the impression of being stopped only by the margin of the canvas. Given another couple of feet or so Spencer would have filled it without premeditation. The religious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”