“... for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to abstract ‘the modern English poem’ and ‘the modern American poem’, the former seems to someone with no axe to grind (I mean myself) less spacious, less athletic, less ...”

“... one gets from dipping into the Journal (1835-44) of Barclay Fox, which reveals exactly the kind of self-confident, debonair, but caring personality that Bence-Jones and Montgomery-Massingberd would like their British aristocrat to have. They ascribe to him a belief in hard work and merit: surely he owes that to an infiltration of the Nonconformist ethic? It is ...”

“... here a radical ambiguity begins. How are we to value them? Is she a real spiritual explorer or a self-deceiving masochist? She doesn’t know herself, and the indications of the text seem equally distributed on both sides. Her life and that of Daisy the drop-out nihilist lead equally to a voie sans issue: a proper enough subject for fiction, except that the ...”

“... age, would have been ascribed to some talisman or potion – all the loyalty, the patience, the self-devotion, was on the side of the mistress. The whims, the haughty airs, the fits of ill-temper, were on the side of the waiting woman,’ While it is true, therefore, as Dr Gregg claims, that there emerges from Anne’s letters a picture of a woman and a ...”

“... into the present, Geoffrey Hartman, for all his full and easy conversance with European thought, self-consciously indicts the Anglo-American failure to receive and practise them, and calls for a form of philosophic criticism even he is unable to ...”

“... from time to time the presence of frustrated, unavowed energies and a consequent posturing and self-deception. He was, by all accounts, an aggressive man, even something of a bully, and like many such people he enjoyed exaggerating his own hard-headedness: according to Berlin, he would, devastatingly, ask candidates for a lectureship in English at the ...”

“... ending, where the themes of the novel seem to be left to drift, and the narrator obtrudes a bit self-consciously by bringing things to an end at the moment of his birth. What I most admire in the novel are particular insights and particular conjunctions. ‘And so I am jealous of every detail in any of those carriages in which she sat, all the more so since ...”

“... that behind the court rake there was the court rake. Mr Treglown writes sharply of ‘the clever, self-destructive group’ of ‘court wits’: ‘even their negligence was calculated, their private life ostentatious.’ Drinking and copulation are major themes of Rochester’s private correspondence, as of his public image. His advice to Nell Gwyn (conveyed ...”

“... and Luttrell wrote nothing. The literary remains of ‘Conversation’ Sharp fill a small volume. Self-conscious attempts to record talk only wreck its spontaneity. In Genius in the Drawing-Room Robert Rosenstone’s essay describes the New York salon of Mabel Dodge which ran (if that’s what salons do) from 1912 to 1914 and was ‘the most famous, and no ...”

“... from his Father’ (which was published in LRB, Vol. 5, No 19) is supposed to be written in self-defence by Hermann Kafka to his son, Franz. It is easy to feel that the relatives of a genius sometimes get a raw deal. There were friends of D.H. Lawrence’s family who objected strongly to the portrait of his father in Sons and Lovers: they denied that he ...”

“... element in these women’s lives is merely the unusual degree to which they allow ambition (or self-interest) a free rein. Women, as feminists often tell us, are the victims of their own wish to please. No one would say that of the women Ms Salamon writes about, though one might, if one were tender-hearted, say it of the men who keep them. ‘What is past ...”

“... bad, but the poet himself is sentimentalised out of recognition; and he’s there as a totem of self-pity, addressed as a fellow-sufferer in the galleys of Grub Street: How to survive; that’s all we want to know. But you didn’t, did you? We don’t use exile as a punishment in Mother England now, not physical exile anyway, presumably because there is ...”

“... when they themselves sponsored ‘new men’ for admission, the most famous, or at least the most self-advertised, of whom was Cicero. But the offices of state were few in number, and as they became, with Roman expansion, increasingly lucrative for the incumbents, they were the object of a fierce and costly competition, the oddity of which was that they were ...”

“... in her attitude to religion much in the writings of Samuel Butler came to her with the force of self-revelation. But on the subject of her family and what it may have given the novels Mrs Spurling, when writing her first volume, had largely to depend on conversations with Ivy’s two surviving sisters, old ladies who for long had scarcely met their ...”

“... of Gilbert Pinfold is the only one who loved the poor mad writer. Such matters are outside his self-appointed limits. Davis allows that Waugh knew most of the story when he started a novel, but finds that he only discovers his deeper purpose as he writes. Thus he speaks of ‘Waugh’s growing understanding of his major themes as well as his plot’ when ...”