“... of a cat, or, God forbid, ourselves, is nauseating. The heartiness of surgeons and butchers is a self-protecting acknowledgment that even when they break into bodies for the best of reasons, and even when the bodies are not human ones, they are doing something indelicate. An exploration of the dark continent within when it could only be done by way of ...”

“... Larbaud’s story, both a homage to the secret transition from girlhood to womanhood and a self-examination of male vanity, is structurally quite different from Humbert Humbert’s autobiography. But there is more than a flavour of the ‘subliminal co-ordinate’ in that passage, and in the domestic situation and the personal. Edith, Queenie’s ...”

“... professing his guilt. In his letters to Bowers he presents himself – with what degree of self-consciousness it’s impossible to tell – as a standard-issue Hollywood psychopath. ‘In a perfect world,’ he writes, ‘an artist like you – a creator of beauty – should never have to come in contact with such an ugliness as me.’ In a letter to ...”

“... in the Daily Express, of all places, but the Mail on Sunday last September ranted that ‘the same self-destructiveness and sheer bloody-mindedness which reduced Britain – victors of the Second World War – to industrial inferiors of Germany and Japan have been strutting the waterfront like peacocks.’ If you believed the Mail on Sunday, you might not want ...”

“... in it either. Eisenman does not hide from the racist contradictions and the lecherous paedophilic self-deceptions that abound in Gauguin. What he explores more sensitively than most is Gauguin’s relativising experiences on his beach. These began in the very first moments of Gauguin’s arrival in Tahiti. Costume was always important to him. It was his ...”

“... of Macedonia), involved much rhetorical nonsense and, on two occasions, the imposition of a self-defeating trade embargo, but comparatively little violence. The anti-Macedonian campaign was a sick affair, for which Greece has rightly paid a heavy price. But by the time of CUP’s change of heart, the campaign was over. CUP were more justified in arguing ...”

“... accelerated clock – Bates still had his mid-morning slot. One day he announced, with a little self-congratulatory tremor in his voice, that he was going to play some of the ‘indie’ music he’d been hearing about. One of the records he had selected was, he said, by a band from Manchester called the Stone Roses. It was called ‘Fool’s Gold’, and ...”

“... it. A deliberate attempt to break with accepted standards, it seemed to Minton faddish, corrupt, self-indulgent and hollow. ‘You might as well call it “Eden Come Home,” ’ he mocked – Eden, then Prime Minister, had abandoned England and the Suez crisis in order to recuperate from illness in Jamaica. (Denny later used this title for another ...”

“... of having to justify her nature or her ambitions. The diaries disclose an unusual degree of self-consciousness together with an unrelenting need for control. Her day-to-day life was hardly solitary. Yet she was lonely, and knew it. The society of equals was perhaps what she wanted most, and accounts for much of her unlovable wish for aristocratic ...”

“... of the Czech nation-state, thereby denying the right of the Bohemian or ‘Sudeten’ Germans to self-determination. At the same time, he applied ethnic and linguistic criteria to sever the Slovak lands from their historic link to the Hungarian crown. Subsequently, he allayed concerns about the fate of the Sudeten German ‘minority’ by promising to apply ...”

“... and manuscript, he gives precision and a new focus to Christopher Hill’s rebuttal of Milton’s self-representation as a lonely prophet. Although courtly ideology and patronage dominated cultural production over much of the 17th century, they proved unable, Norbrook shows, to deflect or contain the enemies of kings. Rome had had other poets besides ...”

“... it may be surprising to find that Ayer habitually thought of himself as an ‘outsider’ and ‘self-made’, exaggerating the poverty of his family, looking at the world, as his widow, Dee Wells, puts it, with ‘big desiring eyes’, and, despite a career of equal brilliance as philosopher and hedonist, often a little anxious about where he stood on the ...”

“... a numerical key. For example, having chosen the five words THAT SWEET BONDAGE FREEDOM’S SELF, an agent would assign a number to each letter according to its alphabetical position and its place within the sentence. Thus, A in THAT gets I written under it, A in BONDAGE 2, B in BONDAGE 3, D in BONDAGE 4, D in FREEDOM 5, the first E in SWEET 6 and the ...”

“... one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised his desire to resurrect the dead and dissect them. So it is not the tone of weary resignation in his suicide note which ...”

“... itself the moment that he has learnt it. Perceval discovers his name in a kind of baptism into self-consciousness, or conscience: he has failed on a quest that he did not even know he was following. He has obeyed his instructions rather than his instincts and so lost the chance to heal the wounded king. What happens next would take a very long time to ...”