“... to, the Fashion, could not trust his Works with the Vulgar without Notes longer than the Work, and Self-praises, to tell them what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was taught to read with his Eyes. The image of Georgian England that still prevails today, some commentators argue, is Georgian England as Pope saw ...”

“... sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling ... the self-involution and dreamlike continuity’, like ‘a sick room heated by stoves’ contrasted with Fielding, who resembles ‘an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’. Most of the themes of Richardson criticism, before and since, are contained in Coleridge’s ...”

“... readers who found the polemics of the two Vindications too rugged were delighted by the melancholy self-portrait of the Letters. All the same, there is a lot more to them than subjective egotistical Romanticism, or the delineation of a wandering female writing to a faithless lover. The thread of interest is always a double one, and the outer world is more ...”

“... to haunt her.’ Much of Barker’s fiction is involved with that attempted exorcism. This self-reflectiveness carried with it the hazard of repetition, and Regeneration, published in 1991, consciously broke a compulsive pattern. It was a historical novel, based on the work of the Army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and ...”

“... claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet has seemed to occupy a position of statelessness somewhere between ...”

“... not so much Omar’s original, to which he was introduced by his great friend Cowell, a brilliant self-taught linguist, but Tennyson’s In Memoriam. FitzGerald’s relations with Tennyson were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his ...”

“... what d’ya mean? We’re not Irish – we’re British.’ They laughed at each other, but rather self-consciously. It was obvious they were discomfited, unsettled, and they flung themselves with increased vigour into another round of furious and distracting activity. This fascinating story follows a subtle and intelligent discussion of Loyalist ...”

“... Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this ...”

“... a lot of people at the time. Unless you were willing to plough through huge volumes on workers’ self-management, the rise and fall of the non-aligned movement or tendentious biographies of Tito, there wasn’t much to read about Yugoslavia. Class, not ethnicity, was what most academics had been interested in during the Cold War, but now nationalism was the ...”

“... movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in ...”

“... glossed over. No doubt Barney herself did much to prompt the prevailing euphoria. She was a born self-publicist and mythomane: a seductress of astonishing (and candid) appetites, the self-appointed doyenne of ‘Greek’ loves, a blowsy, billowy, impossibly garrulous cheerleader for la vie sapphique. (‘I want to be the ...”

“... to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge ...”

“... masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the ...”