“... was also his father. He decides to strike up an acquaintance with her, at first out of vague self-interest: but it soon develops into a genuine emotional tie, which also includes Denny, Gerald’s friend and partner, who becomes obsessed with the girl, and she with him, in a more uncomplicated fashion. Neither of the men knows how much the other sees of ...”

“... Czech word litost – ‘a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self’. The idea isn’t put to much use in the story ‘Litost’, which might suggest that, stripped of its pretensions, it’s not much of an idea. It certainly has an air of the morbus fraudulentus that Chekhov detected in his admirers when they talked to ...”

“... structure perception, and perception than appears to confirm the schemata. Such a theory of self-perpetuation is at its best in accounting for the persistence over long periods of a schema like that of the Plinian races. The problem is that the theory accounts for persistence so successfully as to make change difficult to explain. Yet, as Friedman ...”

“... of a popular success, and it also rescues Thomas’s writing from sprawling psychoanalytical self-indulgence. Perhaps it is with justice that Pushkin’s elegant strength is sometimes compared with Mozart’s. Certainly the effect of moving as a reader from The White Hotel to Ararat recalls a process familiar in the history of musical ...”

“... that the key assumption underlying the monetarist approach is that a market economy is inherently self-stabilising. No evidence is given for this. Indeed, how could it be? What evidence exists would surely suggest that market economies have never been stable, and that even less have they been stable at levels of economic activity, employment and income of ...”

“... his review of Undine that Weber formulated his idea of opera as ‘the German ideal – namely, a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve, to form a new world’. This earliest view of a Gesamtkunstwerk was to be seized upon by Wagner, whose own musical ...”

“... enforce the sense of loss. It might be a conventional protest-poem were it not for its bleak and self-accusing conclusion: I’m afraid, reading this passage now, That everything I knew has been destroyed By those whom I admired but never knew; The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat And I’m afraid most of my friends are dead. Three other poems here ...”

“... And it would all be fun – our own English brand of magic realism – if it were neatly self-sufficient and the pattern of reversals quite harmonious. But not so. Far from being merely playful, The Philosopher’s Pupil reaches out after meaning, and undertakes to deal with such issues as evil, innocence and salvation. So it borrows suggestively ...”

“... countries there is just time.’ It isn’t true, but McGahern shows how these sad myths become self-consolatory. His previous collections have prompted comparisons with Chekhov, and that’s not altogether absurd. But much of the time he seems to be using the data of William Trevor almost as though the setting were Yoknapatawpha county rather than ...”

“... but also maddeningly, seems to have no such sense of standing alone in the world. The restless, self-conscious, capricious style of Expensive Habits suggests that she cannot always believe either in her story or in her mission to tell it. Her subtly entertaining and thought-provoking novel deals, like The Injured Party, with such matters as parent-children ...”

“... Trots themselves. Tony Mulhearn, who ended up trying to get Kilroy’s seat, was designated by the self-appointed Left caucus (a collection of sanctimonious bores) as their candidate for Birkenhead. Faced with the prospect of the reselection battles escalating into an actual confrontation with the electorate, however, Mulhearn scuttled back over the river to ...”

“... to emerge, the map should be used cautiously’. This is a necessary warning: if the guilt, the self-loathing, the sheer demoralisation of much of this fiction were the predominant mood of the real South Africa, not just of its fictional representation in the pages of A Land Apart, Nelson Mandela would be prime minister before the year was out.In the ...”

“... enough – to celebrate Cobden’s rejection of armed intervention whatever the cause, his self-chosen role as an international man. But it was as a Manchester man that Cobden came to be most generally regarded. Before and after the Second World War, a succession of books presented him as a spokesman for the industrial North, as a prime exemplar of ...”

“... to numerous funds and foundations for moneys received, but Raleigh Trevelyan appears to have been self-financing and to have mingled occasional privations with his pleasures (but drawing the line at the unalluring Hotel Decent in Peshawar). He suffered the predictable shocks and importunities of travel, like all those requests for copies of Playboy, along ...”

“... for Belgrade. The people here are Slovenians, tall, fine-looking and Roman in their grace and self-assurance. A few (Croats?) are small and fierce and heavily-moustached, and look as if they are taking a day off from herding the goats. ‘Ah, partisans!’ I find myself thinking. There is a good deal of smoking and they kiss as if it had just come off the ...”