“... is an obsession in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Under Indira Gandhi there was a growth of self-confidence on the part of the underclass in the big towns, and the change of mood had its effect on cricket, which discarded its colonial wardrobe, became more democratic and began to wear the colours of nationalism. In Sri Lanka in the Eighties cricket was ...”

“... that animals occupy’. Like Emerson and Thoreau, Lopez has a doctrine, a plan, an agenda for self-improvement. People, he writes, ‘must learn restraint’. In Arctic Dreams he refers to our ‘obligation’ to the land, our duty ‘to approach it with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try and sense the range and variety of its ...”

“... intervention by the scissors of anyone too sceptical to take this virtual enormity on trust.) The self-denying ordinance to which the members of the Oulipo are pledged has roots of a kind in Queneau’s own literary biography. For this was a man of secretive bent who had served his time when young among the Surrealists, but had then broken with ...”

“... must always be a matter of dispute. The selection of evidence itself can be a subtle form of self-censorship, but the sheer volume of new material he brings to light suggests that Ferguson was allowed to use anything and everything he found. The thirty chapters rest on a huge collection of archival material. I did a rough calculation for three chapters ...”

“... fulfilled ... the Dream and its dark side’. The dark side, too, of the old American gospel of self-reliance and action, especially as the Transcendentalists preached it. ‘Let us enter in the state of war and wake Thor and Woden,’ Emerson demanded. ‘Check this lying hospitality and lying affection.’ Consider Thoreau’s not-so-Green lament in ...”

“... mind, Sussex’s wonderful Indian, Ranjitsinhji: ‘What W.G. did was to unite in his mighty self all the good points of all the good players, and to make utility the criterion of style. He founded the modern theory of batting by making forward and back play of equal importance, relying neither on one nor the other, but on both ... He turned the ...”

“... efforts to unite his realms of Scotland and England, this is only evidence of his desire for ‘self-glorification’. There is, of course, nothing wrong in disliking James I, though I confess to rather a liking for him. The worry is that the dislike and criticism are nowhere brought together into a coherent whole or supported by any sustained ...”

“... He turns the rehearsals into school. He is the schoolmaster alternately praising, sarcastic or self-revealing. The actors vie with each other to please him. He makes them children again so they do not mind being childish and showing their uncertainty. Stood in his cap and old windcheater, he listens to them with a long-suffering air, wide mouth set in a ...”

“... doesn’t.’ There is a nattering sort of theologising here and there: God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes upon other people, doesn’t He? He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is. He did that with Moses. He did it with me. He was gravely disappointed in Saul. But He sure guessed right ...”

“... views. Whether it was a carefully contrived work seems more questionable, though, since hyperbolic self-praise seems to have been an automatic reflex with him: one imagines that he conversed only in a shout, and always about himself, and in the same ways. What is incredible, but still must be true, is that Urquhart really hoped that this work, in which he ...”

“... he was evidently a born teacher. Four years of peripatetic lecturing gave him great verbal self-confidence and made him a lot of useful contacts. Just how he won the Bedwellty nomination in 1969 over the NUM candidate (and why he and Glenys chose to live in Bedwellty in the first place) is a matter of some dispute: once again, though, his successful ...”

“... Yet he does nothing of the kind. It may be that he regards his theological explanation as so self-evident that it did not need to be stated in the Renaissance. But few people who have read the religious literature of the period are likely to accept that preachers or theologians would have refrained from making a point of this kind merely because it was ...”

“... an argument, a question. At times he seems to argue that the Japanese have no conception of self, on the evidence of the shosetsu (for which ‘novel’ is the inevitable but not wholly accurate translation). Like other fresh studies, Accomplices of Silence has irritated the complacent and has still to receive the sincerest form of flattery. On the ...”

“... early found that no one can make a living simply by being a good writer, Colette became an expert self-publicist, for which she had a natural turn. A major item in her stock-in-trade was to put herself over as someone who knew, from experience, everything there was to know about sex. Since she disliked her brothers, she no doubt pounced on her stepson as her ...”

“... psychological claims is often, Charvet suggests, either de Beauvoir’s discussions of women’s self-definition as dependent or passive or Marcuse’s claims about the ‘surplus’ repression which traditional families inflict, but which life in abundant societies does not require. Radical feminists point towards the possibility of an androgynous future in ...”