“... his work, this aims at virtuosity but expresses something completely different: the terminally self-conscious voice of English fiction; condemned to facetiousness, to trifling forms of cleverness and irony. In England, England, something similar happens at the level of genre. The novel is written in at least three different modes. It contains a clever ...”

“... at least at the secondary-school level, in ‘a world of horrifying inequities’: ‘The self-containment of boarding school can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it’s March, or to receive an SUV ...”

“... she barely knows; in this book it is a painting that is similarly bequeathed. In each novel the self-interest of the male survivors frustrates the bequest, but the house and the picture still end up where their owners wanted them to. These parallels continue. Forster, as has often been noticed, has on occasion a certain peremptoriness of manner. He brings ...”

“... essay in this collection is about the unique importance Conrad has come to have for him since his self-taught father, ‘picking his way through a cultural confusion of which he was perhaps hardly aware’, introduced him to ‘Conrad the late starter, holding out hope to those who didn’t seem to be starting at all’. Conrad’s value to me is that he is ...”

“... there is something immensely attractive about Mr Sedgemore’s loathing for the sycophancy, self-importance and humbug of the Wilson and Callaghan courts, he is a much better diarist and autobiographer than political analyst. His book gives quite a good picture of what life was like in the Parliamentary Labour Party during the Wilson and Callaghan ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is not that they were uninterested: it is that they believed the explanations for the changes were self-evident. Since the 17th century, medical thought has been dominated by the concept of the body as a machine whose protection from disease and its effects depends primarily on internal intervention. The modern improvement in health was assumed to be due to ...”

“... the artist experiments with the human frame as the most flexible, ductile, indefatigably protean self-deforming system in nature. This is art history at its best, a truly humanistic activity, since it helps to give man back to himself and his possibilities, both by pointing out what lay before our eyes but which we had missed seeing for so long, and by its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... limited intelligence leads him to suppose is right. His awareness of the nobility of Antigone’s self-sacrifice does not blind him to her obstinacy and hardness – natural, as the Chorus point out, in a daughter of Oedipus.The Oedipus of the Tyrannus seems to Winnington-Ingram to stand somewhat apart from the other heroic figures, because of his exceptional ...”

“... 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 ...”