“... politics paper with a radical American feminist who fiercely declaimed the truths that were self-evident to her, if not to others. William, when asked, would always smile happily and say he agreed with everything she’d said. In the end he was so amiable and agreeable that his tutors started to feel he’d lost his intellectual edge. Gloomily, we began ...”

“... of the soluble, and hurl oneself at the seemingly insoluble, requires unusual, perhaps messianic self-confidence. Cosmologists in particular belong to a calling that predisposes to extravagant (if intellectually rarefied) conjecture. Horgan quotes the opinion of an eminent particle physicist that quantum cosmology, time-reversal and wormholes between ...”

“... critical, takes a more measured view. The great merit of Said’s book, he says, was to shake the self-satisfaction of many Orientalists, challenging their claim to academic neutrality. But Said’s critique was, he believes, too sweeping, and Said loaded the dice by choosing as his targets only British and French Orientalists – the representatives of big ...”

“... concern with its own historical appropriations and Quinn’s parallel affair with the word involve self-consciousnesses which distract us from the clearly urgent claims of Albany’s evolution and agonies. Quinn’s admission that he does not expect to solve the ‘mysteries’ of his life sounds humble enough, but it may be associated with an element of ...”

“... in Asia and the Pacific, as events proved only too clearly in 1942. But, despite the brash self-confidence Vidal describes, the USA would not have undertaken Antipodean defence, and British withdrawals would only have increased Japanese ambitions. Nor can one predict the effects of US withdrawals today. President Carter’s efforts to pull US Forces ...”

“... our fear that it could well be our turn next. But there is more to this suspense assault than mere self-interest. Each snippet of cockpit dialogue is saturated in dramatic irony: we know what the speakers do not know, at least not yet. At the same time, this stuff is all for real: real life, real death. Our superior knowledge has no value – not even the ...”

“... holding onto vine-stems. The climb got easier. As he got to the bare top he felt a surge of self-confidence, but nearly fell down a rocky cleft. He was terrified again. He entered a rural hut, hand in hand with a young boy in an ash-coloured suit. He described the dream variously in various tellings, but no more than anyone would. He concluded that it ...”

“... it, particularly in the matter of evidence. Sometimes the sources cited are obviously tainted and self-serving, with partisan speeches and Communist newspapers quoted to illustrate alleged misdemeanours on the part of the authorities. Surely people weren’t imprisoned only for telling policemen that they could be doing something better with their time? And ...”

“... and at the time of writing it seems as if he will survive, at least partly as a result of his own self-declared impotence. A better prospect emerged from the train drivers’ union which threatened to strike if proper safety equipment was not installed immediately. At the same time, the workers at Ford, Dagenham, threatened to strike against constant ...”

“... of themselves as outsiders, solitaries, especially if they were writers before they turned to self-revelation. Certainly this book is written. For all the evidence that the atmosphere of his home was ‘saturated with unhappiness’ the book that describes it sounds reasonably contented. The crazed grandmother, driving everybody mad as she went about ...”

“... onto the ‘magnificently eventful’ sea. This is a long book, in some respects rather superbly self-indulgent. It has a curious structure: Raban’s voyage has a sort of ghostly double, the voyage of Discovery, commanded by Captain Vancouver, which sailed from Falmouth in April 1791. Discovery proceeded via Cape Town, Australia and New Zealand, Tahiti and ...”

“... will work honestley for a small wage.” “I can make good furnisher.” ’ This loss of self-sufficiency has always been the Afrikaner’s worst nightmare. The Poor Whites are not well represented in South African fiction – outside the Afrikaans novel, that is. In the Thirties several Afrikaner writers wrote poignantly about the armblanke and ...”

“... by his exhibitionist companion or eager to be ‘as free as tumble weed’, Richardson’s self-portrait is calculated to appeal to his readers. Only at one moment is he less circumspect. Intent on making the cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein, known as ‘Madame’, grotesquely funny as she fails to resist the ‘fresh green smell of newly minted ...”

“... a strange antitype, a funhouse distortion, of his inventor. He is Jewish and costive rather than self-consciously WASP and Trollopianly fluent, but over the years he has had his bookish successes, including a bestseller, and more than what, in the old days, would have been thought his fair share of women. The titles and dates of his works and conquests are ...”

“... nowhere the stuff that either issued from the hand of God or grew out of what Darwin called the ‘self-developing energies’ of the cosmos. Many of his examples are valid. Most of the moors were not, before people arrived, tracts of bents and heather and bog-cotton: they were jungles of broad-leaved trees and conifers. Valley bottoms in the American sierras ...”