“... Eminent Victorians, published in 1918. Of Strachey’s chosen targets, Cardinal Manning was a self-deceiving hypocrite, Dr Thomas Arnold the epitome of earnest Victorianism, who modelled his pedagogic vision on Jehovah’s relations with the Israelites, Florence Nightingale a bedridden female tyrant who drove her devoted male acolytes to early death, and ...”

“... to do with the beauty or otherwise of one’s body, but everything to do with one’s sense of self. If I have no control over what is known about me, I am seriously diminished as a person both in my own eyes and in those which are capable of intruding upon me.’ As one gets further into the book it becomes clear that, for the authors, the right of the ...”

“... to be squeezed in. The last mentioned is the work of Rosie Jackson, who also reprints Frieda’s self-portrait Not I but the Wind. Ms Jackson believes it time to correct what she takes to be the hostile general view of Frieda, and to show that her insights into Lawrence’s work are important ‘for us in our current crises around gender’. What she takes ...”

“... at imagining deathbeds, including his own (‘The Cottage Hospital’), but he was also a shrewd self-critic. Textually, the letters contain much that will be important to Betjeman scholars if not to the general reader. In the correspondence of December 1947, we come across something like a running commentary on the poem which finally appeared as ‘Sunday ...”

“... at people and positions Putnam now deplores, including his own earlier, insensitive scientistic self. Where once he was a metaphysical realist and machine functionalist, now he repudiates the idea of a ‘ready-made world’ and disavows the computer model of mind. Notorious for his capacity to change his mind, he has come to see the whole analytic style of ...”

“... to the way his life will be taken from him; misses too, in the absorption of his romance and his self-pity, what it means to love someone so much you won’t give them up. Ryder does what she can with all this, she is bright and quick and engaging, but in the end there are just two stories here, one in her manner and another in the plot, or one for two hours ...”

“... fact that, as Southern has again said, Europe in the 11th century experienced ‘that moment of self-generating growth for which economists now look so anxiously in underdeveloped countries’. It could be more significant than is suggested by the place, rather late in his book, that Bartlett allots it, that the expansionary parts of Europe had almost ...”

“... by the very words used to assert it. Thus the permanence of the Greek eros can be made to sound self-evident by the mere repetition of the concept of the erotic and of the word eros. Part of the purpose of Calasso’s narrative and expository method is to recapture the magical dimensions of mythical language. For Calasso it took divine interference in human ...”

“... yet independent of it; she knew Virginia Woolf but condescended to what she regarded as the over-self-conscious Mrs Dalloway, and indeed one suspects that she thought herself, though without vanity, which was not one of her vices, as simply a better writer than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may ...”

“... and articles, why is Steinbeck the subject of only fifteen or twenty?’ That is the question. Few self-respecting writers cite Steinbeck as an influence; even those critics who admit to once having had a soft spot for his work attribute it to the unformed tastes of adolescence. One grows out of him, like acne. The small band of writers who do admire Steinbeck ...”

“... for instance, that: ‘What strikes the casual [sic] reader most about this passage is Dante’s self-conscious choice of the French term, alluminar (his version of enluminer), rather than the standard Italian word miniare (from minio, red oxide of lead).’ I learned something new on virtually every page. At the same time Gage’s interpretations of the ...”

“... with reports of teenage gangs, street battles, vigilantes attacking ‘alien elements’, even self-styled Nazi groups. The administration of justice has come under fire, with Literaturnaya Gazeta reporting ‘a torrent of complaints’ against the actions of the militia, the procuracy and the courts. In January, Pravda announced the dismissal of a KGB ...”

“... dismay. Foremothers shrouded in veils murmured from the sky ... joyous in his release from some self-preoccupation, some tense and Western inwardness. Here was something he could do something about.’ The last anyone sees of Abbas, he is running towards the aeroplane, arms waving, just as some troops arrive and a battle breaks out. As the battle ...”

“... grand scale, and everyone knows it is; the Saudis seem to live, at times, in a national frenzy of self-hatred, attracted to Western culture while despising it, and despising themselves for being attracted. When they look in the mirror, a foreigner and a devil looks back. In the past, other Arabs regarded the desert people as backward and deprived: but the ...”

“... may be that in Connolly’s case quarrelling was a natural extension of his endless capacity for self-pity. As for his wife, it was one of the things she did best, in life and in art. When Connolly was complaining about her to Edmund Wilson, he told him that she was busy turning her diary into a novel and that ‘it was intolerable to have this typewriter ...”