“... thought to be part and parcel of womanliness here found a bizarre kind of apotheosis: the ultimate self-sacrifice. The dynamics of the seance might seem no more than further dismal evidence of woman’s docile submission to an artificial feminine ideal. But things are, as Owen abundantly demonstrates, a good deal more complicated than that. Barred from ...”

“... There are moving stories, too, of endurance, and women’s long tradition (or bad habit) of self-sacrifice. This relates to the most persistent theme of all, the double-shift, or (more threateningly) the double-duty. On the one hand, the woman’s job, and, on the same hand, the home and children. Tanya, in Anna Mass’s ‘A Business Trip Home’, is a ...”

“... was a wariness about his eyes which suggested a man who was compelled to make an effort to conquer self-doubt’), and knows what they think and do not think. He is an expert in pain and silence (‘The wave of her misery hit him now, knocking the breath out of him’); but also, rather oddly, a collector of grotesques (the lesbian lady who insists on treating ...”

“... is of them in the streets, and have managed to make professional football look like a miracle of ...”

“... often distracting, especially in the two rooms housing the de Chiricos. Happily, they have been self-effacing in the two Futurist rooms. These rooms are surely the organisers’ pride and joy. They have sustained a high level of quality by concentrating mainly on the movement’s two major artists, and have managed to procure the loans of masterpieces by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of voice.’ That gives the clue. The confident poetic voice takes things for granted, is never self-conscious about what it says, however unexpected or incomprehensible this may be. In a note on Betjeman’s ‘Myfanwy’ Amis says the poet has ‘got him where he wants’ with poems in this vein, ‘but I have never been able to work out quite where that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hymns in alternate lines (gallery v. floor, under-forties v. over-forties), and ‘pretending self-indulgently that if Christ was not risen from the dead they would go home and put their heads in the gas oven’. Their capers, as Max Wright calls them, made him feel a bit faint; and made me feel that Edmund Gosse did not know his luck. But on second ...”

“... midsummer nightmare dissolved into a midsummer night’s dream again. All this is summed up in the self-consciously literary opening paragraph of The Magic Toyshop (1967): ‘The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land.’ Which reminds us – and this may also be reflected in Angela ...”

“... the islanders were trapped in their remote home, unable to escape the consequences of their self-inflicted environmental collapse. Ponting warns that the same thing could happen to us. Living conditions deteriorated on Easter Island. Crop yields declined. People died off. In 1722, the Europeans found, not a sophisticated society of 7000 people, but a ...”