“... Terry eases himself down a rung or two, with a genial shrug. Nothing impinges on his rock-solid self-esteem. His DIY, his annual holiday at Butlin’s, the benign companionship of Shirley, his ‘small garden big enough to sit in but not too big to be a problem to look after’: these are the blessings Terry counts, repeatedly. ‘Call me unpretentious but ...”

“... own history). When Sassoon was invited by Dunn to contribute, he responded first by writing a long self-analytical poem, ‘A Footnote on the War: (On Being Asked to Contribute to a Regimental History)’, and decided he must refuse; then he changed his mind and, drawing on his diaries, sent Dunn a 12-page account which appears as a separate chapter (and which ...”

“... has called the ‘herd’ instinct of the market ensured that the fall, once started, became self-reinforcing. However, this mechanistic explanation throws no light on why there should have been a sudden reversal of sentiment in the market. Because our understanding of the workings of the stock market and its impact on the economy is so imperfect, it ...”

“... Othello’s big speech to be a rather high-flown but timely and militarily justified piece of self-commendation. Othello, so far from being regarded as a vain and dangerous intruder, is so trusted a soldier that he is chosen at the moment of crisis to defend Cyprus and Christendom against the Turk. The point is simply that he had accessible ...”

“... fecoventilatory collision’, which alone of the words I have cited seems to be more or less self-explanatory, unless you know Greek, Japanese and the presumably upmarket slang to which the dictionary refers in defining ‘mopery’. This lexical work is not the only trial of the reader’s education or ingenuity. One has also to guess what it means, for ...”

“... whom Lord David Cecil declared to be ‘a great man’, yet who seems to have had only a minimal self-knowledge and who had a capacity for getting things ‘plumb wrong’ in human relationships. It was certainly a man of unusual talent who produced some sixty books, including English Literature in the 16th Century, excluding Drama, the famous books of ...”

“... to something in Robinson himself. But while it is a characteristic insight, it is not a self-portrait. Robinson, too, is interested in non-human reality, but he is more interested in the relation between this and human reality. Cosmic time and historical time intersect for him, over and over again, in the fine meshed grid map of Aran. He is abundant ...”

“... decided to concentrate on ‘the letters and passages where Browning’s and Elizabeth Barrett’s self-consciousness and consciousness of the other were at their sharpest and most intense: where the writers were lovers and the lovers writers’, and to omit most of ‘the Victorian domestic, social, political, religious and artistic scene’. So out go ...”

“... question: ‘Could the man of parts live without grocers?’ The radical aesthetic of O’Nolan is self-destructive. In his fiction the most intense imagination is a regressive condition of the dead and of the damned. The abyss of selfhood (der selbe) becomes a comedy of footnotes and of policemen. De Selby and McCruiskeen: fantastic, jaunty and ...”

“... In recalling this aspect of the affair, Oddie is reduced to striking a sententious note, self-righteously declaring: ‘I have not taken it upon myself to offer any considered judgment, as others have not hesitated to do, on whether or not it is right to tell lies under certain circumstances, and whether or not such circumstances existed to justify ...”

“... concomitant of such high-tension music-making, largely because they promote the diffusion of self-consciousness and also prolong the capacity for mutually generated excitement. Heckstall-Smith, while never descending to crude theorising, is very good indeed on this subject. He charts the decline of fellow saxophonist and one-time band-leader Graham Bond ...”

“... to the country they left: to the same constraints and lies, the same monotonous speechifying by self-regarding functionaries; the same ‘critical works discussions’; the same pretend-democracy. While English children love ‘playing shops’, German children play at being postal workers: weighing parcels, franking letters, issuing postal orders and ...”

“... all were accompanied by the familiar metaphors of catharsis and purgation. So was born the self-parodying vocabulary of the enterprise culture: ‘wealth-creation’, ‘renaissance’, ‘transformation’. With the happy assistance of the press and others ready to believe, much of it – notably the phrase the ‘Thatcher revolution’ – soon ...”

“... As Duchess of York and later as Queen, Elizabeth lent ‘Bertie’ strength and boosted his self-confidence (whereas Wallis only made Edward more feebly dependent on herself). Yet he showed considerable strength and will-power of his own in determining to marry Elizabeth in the first place, overcoming the discouragement of two refusals to win her in the ...”

“... are of remarkably even quality and interest,’ for Woolf seems to have been an exceptionally self-consistent man, a man of integrity, if that expression is still, in post-modern times, permissible. Of course it might be that the selection has been made to reinforce this opinion of him – for Spotts is a great admirer, though he does go out of his way to ...”