“... her around. Thinking about herself, and her family life, past and present, produces a kind of self-congratulatory, fake amazement at the things required of her: ‘How has Eleanor stayed alive for so long?’ It’s unfair, of course, to implicate the author in the foibles of her character; but Susan Schaeffer doesn’t adopt any of the usual devices ...”

“... out of the visit. He sums it up: ‘The patriarch and his piles, a grandfather wounded in his self-esteem by his grand daughter! The mother more bitter than anxious, the father no more concerned than the others, the educated son, smoothing things down and persuading everyone to do nothing.’ He has missed the entire point of the domestic crisis ...”

“... weak and friendless to resist her. This was success of a sort, though hardly the triumph of the self-confident autocracy so admired by Miss Behrens. It may well have been enough to convince the educated classes of Prussia that they lived under a system that worked; that they were part, indeed, of such a system, since the vast majority of them seem to have ...”

“... to withstand what they would consider ill-informed prejudice. In Britain we have no such self-confident cadre. Furthermore, it is difficult to be a friend of the nuclear industry. The easy arguments are all stacked in the hands of those who are against nuclear power. To argue convincingly for nuclear power requires some knowledge of engineering and ...”

“... consistently lively.’ This is pure Dryasdust, a pretended apology masking the author’s self-satisfaction. There are other Scottish characteristics in Augustus. The hero has a slave, called Septimus, a bonnie laddie from the Sabine Hills, ‘with ungrammatical Latin and long vowel sounds’, who recalls the despondent Augustus to his duty by ...”

“... impulses (‘caring ... compassionate’) must be made fun of if they are not to seem intolerably self-righteous: and yet he gives those things their real due with unemphatic force. One of the best things the book does and gives is the sense in which old devils feel warm for each other and try to look after each other, with a little help from the young: so ...”

“... selected, edited and juxtaposed around a theme. But they are not enhanced, and they are not given self-conscious substance by any 20th-century trickery. It works well. The narrative skims along with an extraordinary lightness, thanks partly to a swift editing and pointing of the significant matter but also to Vizinczey’s impatience with clutter. He has ...”

“... is some third thing which makes sentences true; nor does anti-realism. In accordance with his self-description, Davidson falls squarely on the realist side of this dispute. If he did not, he would not take truth as primitive for the reasons he does. He would regard a wedding of truth with warranted assertibility as made in heaven. Part of the reason he ...”

“... form to tell a story of contemporary Californian life would have daunted a less determined and self-assured writer – though at least ‘Onegin’ can be rhymed with ‘Reagan’: How can I (careless of time) use The dusty bread molds of Onegin In the brave bakery of Reagan? The answer is that he can, and does. The chief characteristic of Pushkin’s ...”

“... doubt that the wonderfully monstrous Gertrude in Pictures from an Institution, is really a kind of self-portrait, like Flaubert’s of Madame Bovary, based on Jarrell’s knowledge of his own will. At the same time there is something extremely likeable about him, and his need to give and receive affection, and this comes through in all the letters. Marianne ...”

“... are between these. A book is not just a lot of words on one subject: it should aspire to a certain self-containedness. These pieces do not take up one another’s loose ends: even juxtaposed, they retain the characteristic feel of articles. Of course this question of genre need not matter much, even if we do make sense of it. Good journal articles are probably ...”

“... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...”

“... prominence has redirected scholarship to the history of the subject. Noting, with the authority of self-evidence, that from the Roman Empire to the Common Market Western Europe (and he might have added North America) owes its civilisation to translators, Louis Kelly sets out to investigate the history of the art from both a theoretic and a pragmatic ...”

“... of monogamy. Milton’s rebel angels argued that they were not created by God but were ‘self-begot’. Milton’s heresies are traditionally attributed to Classical sources: Ginzburg’s remarkable book reinforces the suggestion that we should think rather about Milton’s relationship to popular culture. The Cheese and the Worms is enthralling ...”

“... Ruth to practise hallucinating friends, relatives, her children; then himself, then her ‘self’: that is, she would hallucinate another Ruth across the room and act out a dialogue with her in order to gain insight into her troubles. She hallucinated her husband making love to her and reported it to be very satisfactory. As the psychoanalysand ...”