“... art lover herself) had many ways of diverting him from objects. His energies appeared in angered self-explanation. Since this gave us the masterpiece of Fors Clavigera one feels even less inclined to listen to the amateur Ruskinians who scold him for failing to promote Impressionism. Not to demand things from him is a help in appreciating Ruskin. He often ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The circuit from pure objectivity to subjectivity is complete. Old men write retrospective and self-revealing novels. William Seward Hall (‘a corridor, a hall leading to many doors’) plays off against William Seward Burroughs. Much of the work revolves around fictional St Albans and Johnsonville, by actual St Louis Missouri, where Burroughs was born in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... defensiveness’. Much of his own book is, however, devoted to equally natural reactions of self-justification on matters in which others believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the ...”

“... Brogan points out in his biography, while Ransome ‘did not live to encounter that marvellously self-serving critical doctrine according to which the only subject of art is art and even such works as Emma are concerned chiefly with their own writing ... his tale comes close to exemplifying it.’ ‘Captain Flint’, a bald, fat man like Ransome ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jacek Kuron, the driving force behind KOR, the Solidarity think-tank: ‘Can a revolution ever be self-limiting?’ A few days before his arrest in November, Kuron reaffirmed his belief that Solidarity had modestly to acknowledge Poland’s ‘geopolitical situation’ (Poland’s code phrase for admitting that it is in the Soviet sphere of influence): in ...”

“... to be able to slug it out toe to toe with a dictionary (OAD) that does not announce its self-census, but probably weighs in at upwards of 70,000. But is one to conclude from that remarkable achievement that LNGD is a remarkable children’s dictionary, or rather that if its selection of vocabulary is really what ll-to-16-year-olds need, then ...”

“... Ethology in the modern sense, and not John Stuart Mill’s, the study of animal behaviour, is self-evidently a biological science. And insofar as it concerns itself with non-human animals, it has no agents’ accounts to contend with. Least like a novelist, therefore, certainly least like a bad novelist, for he writes with a quite compelling ...”

“... on the testimony, that full awareness can develop. To this extent, Sweetsir is a work built on the self-importance of the Lawrentian proposition that only fiction can give us the ‘whole hog’. Yglesias’s novel is an effective mixture of fashionable polemic, courtroom melodrama and topical allusion to currently celebrated crimes of passion. Whether women ...”

“... She deliberately evokes the world of Julius and Augustus Caesar, where well-meaning, self-seeking senators slide nervously past the shadowy colonnades and smooth youths snatch bangles from the sleek arms of tempting girls beneath statues of Pompey and Hermaphroditus, while the street-gangs of Milo and Clodius achieve respectability by running ...”