“... Refuses’, is the most vivid and absorbing part of Novel with Cocaine, because Maslennikov’s self-castigation has not yet become obsessive; most of his attention here is devoted to the quirky personalities of his schoolmates, all of whom are more engaging than Maslennikov himself. He moves on from them into a pointless affair with an older woman and ...”

“... with a number of engaging lunacies. Consider the conjecture that Heraclitus’s ‘great feat of self-expression in prose and in philosophy’ was not equalled until Montaigne published his Essays. Or better, relish the suggestion that lyric poetry ‘for all we know to the contrary may be prehuman’. And some may find equally charming the more frequent ...”

“... to transgress the order of nature by which like gives birth to like … ’ An elegant piece of self-deprecatory rhetoric, no doubt, but much more as well. For what Cervantes is doing here is to cast doubt on the very nature of poetic inspiration. In place of the vatic artist, in touch with a transcendental reality, there is only the human being, doing his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one in relation to their own. They can tut-tut over the cruelty, intellectual confusion and self-righteousness which attends the exposure of ‘traitors’ in America, while not noticing these qualities in a British setting. Perhaps in some part of our minds we suppose that America does not really exist, and that her journalists and novelists are making ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more reckless gambling.’ But indulgence in house-building was a particularly tempting form of self-assertion in expenditure. The builder could always claim, unless his mania ended in bankruptcy, that he had done it all for the benefit of future generations. One after another the separate items – side pavilions, stable block, terraces, kitchen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... societies of Cambridge and even of Oxford are in danger of being seen by the outside world as self-complacent and claustrophobic in their concern with small precedences and promotions. Hugh Carey is well aware that the small beer of Cambridge is not necessarily champagne to the outside world. His biography is not of the suffocating kind. Forbes’s ...”

“... talk about in the late Seventies, but an insufficient growth of effective demand, and this was a self-inflicted wound. Sterling was overvalued, and if it was not to be devalued – and Wilson was almost pathologically determined that it should not be – then the balance of payments could only be kept on an even keel by the fall in imports, and gain in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... certain lines, but the existence of earlier and later versions of a poem proves nothing about the self-consciousness of the poet’s technique; it suggests only that the poet looked at what he had written and was dissatisfied. Ricks is not a Mediaevalist and he is careful to make a respectful gesture towards those of his colleagues who are. With Marvell and ...”

“... tall hostess in Hollywood, of Hungarian extraction, who will fling her arms wide in infectious self-enthusiasm and say: ‘I am a woman of impulse. When I am hungry, I eat. When I am tired, I sleep.’ It is unfair to speak of Zandra Rhodes’s text, but the photographs of her designs are worlds away from working lives. I remember that, when I was 17, I ...”

“... so himself. But his embarrassment, pride and surprise at the fact (‘Me a poet!’ begins his ‘Self Justification’) are a dominant theme in the 50 sonnets that make up his collection, Continuous, which adds 33 new poems to the 17 that first appeared in ‘The School of Eloquence’ sequence of 1978. At their simplest level, that of narrative (for the ...”