“... encrusted the pure teaching of the Veda over the centuries, and to produce well-educated Indians, self-confident, proud of their own culture, and with no need or desire to ape the British. Its development, its internal fissures, and its relations with the Congress movement, are an important thread in the book. As an Arya Samajist, Babuji discouraged those of ...”

“... domestic staff. The sense of identity never falters. Nor does the sense of comedy, the enjoyable self-mockery that comes with the realisation that African reality often pairs absurdly with European habits. ‘There are two huge puff adders on the boundary – such a worry because of the dogs ... Porcupines are eating my spuds.’ Or, on the outbreak of ...”

“... before her into the imaginary relations she is creating is good. It is easy to imagine how a more self-conscious and workaday critic would settle down to transposing and tightening these sentences: ‘It is remarkable ...’ ‘How strange that ...’ and so on. But Pritchett’s style answers to the shape and direction of his thoughts – and to their ...”

“... essence’ would probably be little affected if the vote were restricted to those with a ‘self-conscious interest’ in the fortunes of the nation: people of position, education, wealth or power. The principle of charity should replace the welfare state. The law should strictly control morality, for the family and its natural authority must be the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rather than a succession of brilliantly-lit set-pieces, but the whole thing has such extraordinary self-assurance that complaints soon die away.That calm eccentric boldness is, for reasons I can’t pretend to know, a stylistic habit of the present moment, but only of some women writers. Perhaps they have rediscovered and modernised kinds of attention, kinds ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... how much more so of Jonson’s wonderfully judged, poised and (as Leavis used to say) even self-consciously ‘central’ poem, ‘Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I ...’; and of Herrick’s ‘A sweet disorder in the dress ...’ and ‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes ...’, and of Marvell’s ‘Ye living lamps, by whose dear light’, and ...”

“... effect’ is of ‘conversation’. And Woodward writes: ‘In The Pisan Cantos the poet’s own self, having been largely absorbed into mask, pastiche and translation in earlier Cantos, for the first time appears on stage.’ All this is true and not true, and the sense in which it is not true is important. Pound and his circumstances in the detention camp ...”

“... 1914, Tuchman is forced to invent one of her own. The result is a series of eight essays, self-contained, entertaining in themselves, with occasional patches of superb writing, but feebly connected by concepts taken from the period itself: ‘the unconscious boredom of peace’, the desire for combat, and the existence of surplus energies seeking ...”

“... of the West Highland white terrier: ‘Small, active, game, hardy, possessed of no small amount of self-esteem with a varminty appearance’. It makes constant reference to a dog’s imagined historical form, and to the importance of its being ‘fit for function’, even or especially if the demand for that function was obliterated by the industrial ...”

“... exacerbated by a global financial crisis; the external shocks of Covid and Ukraine; and the self-inflicted harms of austerity, Brexit and Liz Truss. The UK economy was growing, and then it wasn’t. The books were more or less balanced, and then they weren’t. We were OK, and now we aren’t.From an economic perspective, the solution to this ...”

“... offering people a piece of their sentimental essence back to themselves, a glimpse of an idealised self. Just as Freud believed dreams were picture puzzles, today it seems that songs and famous faces are now active elements of our subconscious, holding us – sometimes a whole generation of us – in uncanny thrall.The programme for Abba Voyage could simply ...”

“... and street artists. Across the Clyde, there was until recently a popular skatepark, entirely self-organised. Close by, next to the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s monumental former offices, whose top floors are level with the motorway, is the interchange of the M8 and the M74, which leads eventually to the English border. The interchange is one of the ...”

“... destruction and the excesses of consumerism that have seemed almost compulsory in recent self-reflective fiction. The art on the walls of the public areas of the ICU shows a Midwestern prairie in bloom, ‘though there wasn’t a prairie any more, not really. It was the most devastated ecosystem in the world.’ The narrator meditates on a bag of ...”