“... Like any self-respecting modern man I buy Ecover instead of Fairy Liquid. I recycle, I worry about my carbon footprint (must cut down on those Ryanair mini-breaks) and I’m about to buy my first hemp T-shirt. Global warming has got scary, industrialised agriculture makes me angry and I’m delighted to be living in a green moment, with Labour and the Tories both desperate to appear the more eco-friendly party ...”

“... book is fastidious about segregating Yiddish and vernacular American speech from the narrator’s self-consciously literary English, which even uses British rather than American spelling. In an essay published in 1990, Hana Wirth-Nesher argued that David experiences the English language as ‘a foreign culture inhabiting his psyche. Whether he desires it or ...”

“... situations; others appear in one story and are never seen again. At the same time, each story is a self-sufficient unit: it really is a story, rather than a chapter in a Modernist novel. As the stories of Superboy and Superbaby are introduced only retrospectively, so Babel followed the Red Cavalry cycle with a Childhood cycle, set in Odessa in the early ...”

“... inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it less freakish or more explicable ...”

“... ever in a purer element Found ready welcome. And after sixty or more lines of accusation and of self-accusation Wordworth turns away with the suggestion of something still unrevealed:                          Time may come When some dramatic Story may afford Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my Friend, What then I learn’d, or ...”

“... no! Not even to escape the pain, Debate and anguish that I underwent Flying from thee and my own self in vain With trouble wasted, till my strength all spent. I knew at last that thou or love or fate Had conquered and repentance was too late. The idea of a forbidden love also came to Lady Gregory in another poem, not part of the sonnet sequence, written as ...”

“... in place in the opening chapters: he has ‘a suspicious nature’; he is ‘distrustful, distant, self-absorbed’; he is ‘a master of self-exculpation’. In two sentences in Chapter 5 his whole life is laid before us, though he has yet to reach his 30th year: ‘Keeping himself free from encumbrance’ (with a first ...”

“... and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism. He doesn’t have a perch in academia, where most prominent African-American intellectuals have found a stable home. Nor ...”

“... itself remarkably capable of coming to terms with apparent threats to its traditional values and self-image. From Leavis to American deconstruction, the story that Eagleton has to tell is one of successive accommodating moves between the literary-academic ‘institution’ and those critics, schools or ideas which begin by challenging its cultural ...”

“... difference comes down to in the end is the question of how far texts can be treated as autonomous, self-sufficient verbal artefacts. Riffaterre is at one with Brooks and Wimsatt – not to mention Aristotle and his formalist descendants – in believing that they must be so treated if poems are to retain any kind of enduring significance. He doesn’t, of ...”

“... Auden, ‘of which the ending is only a cloudy vision at present’.He had a gift for startling self-exposure: ‘The frankness seems almost deliberately self-lacerating,’ Julian Symons wrote. John Lehmann said he was ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person’ he had ever met. In an ...”

“... Königsberg, the young people of Jena were convinced that a post-Kantian future of autonomous self-creation belonged to them. Before long August and Caroline Schlegel also settled in Jena, followed by Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel. Then Hölderlin arrived, and in 1798 his brilliant young friend Schelling – a 23-year-old professor with an irresistible ...”

“... reading of the new enemy and therefore to its decision to launch an ineffectual, misdirected and self-defeating counterattack. Third, the neo-con democratisation project, having become a widely publicised justification for the invasion after the fact, makes assumptions about the nature of the threat that clash with the basic theoretical framework of the ...”

“... nobody’s fool. Even further, they suggest an unaggressive sensuality, the deep pleasure of a self-contained bodily ease that demands no sacrifice of decorum nor startling exoticism to be immediately compelling. Chanel is rightly more admired as a stylistic innovator than as a genius of pure couture. To a certain extent, her sartorial achievements were ...”

“... no tale of emancipation here – feminist historians have shown that within patriarchy this is a self-serving male illusion; and no well-worn labels either. The book’s subject, then, is ‘writings dedicated to imparting to the public teachings about sex – together with their authors, contexts and impacts’. And the story Porter and Hall tell is fairly ...”