“... of projection; the text is a screen on which the critic shows his own fears and desires. But the self-exposure in this unfinished essay seems wilful and extreme, as when Empson relates, in response to the fairy Mustardseed, that ‘I have not noticed mustard still biting while being evacuated, but I sometimes have the curry; and this of course makes it ...”

“... here from the massacrous world of Blood Meridian, since the boy worries even about this act of self-defence: ‘I dont know. I dont know nothin about him. I never even knew his name. He could have been a pretty good old boy. I dont know. I dont know that he’s supposed to be dead.’ These reflections concern a paid assassin. John Grady’s ...”

“... regard for Mother Gisson, the wise-woman? Is Broch criticising him, perhaps indulging in self-criticism? Casey has found a letter of Broch’s, written while he was working on Massenpsychologie, which states that he is concerned ‘not with the behaviour of the masses but with the problem of the lost and lonely individual, who seeks ...”

“... than simple emergency food relief, the EPLF can also claim to be working towards the goal of self-reliance. Yet all of these advances are cordoned off from the rest of Africa by the remoteness of the terrain and the exigencies of the war. It is a strange situation: in a secluded corner of the continent a ragged army of Eritrean fighters is defending some ...”

“... in high politics. Lloyd George had learned the trade in a hard school. Though incapable of self-criticism, he was shrewd at judging, and ruthless in exploiting, the reactions of others. He was a first-class negotiator. His political perceptions were extremely quick: he was never tied by inertia to his previous position. He kept his ear close to the ...”

“... Douglas was sure to bring him further disasters. It was the clearest possible proof of Wilde’s self-destructiveness that knowing all he did about the treachery of this lover he should again put himself in his hands. If one emotion prevails over all others in Ellmann’s book it is loathing and contempt for Bosie, Wilde’s great love and worst enemy – a ...”

“... Of power, of honour and omnipotence’. And it is implicit throughout the whole disappointing, self-gratifying rigmarole of Faustus as magus. The ‘demi-god’ magician proves to be a charlatan after all: a seeker of material power who, in his own words, ‘aims at nothing but external trash’. In the context of the 1590s, this can be read as a cynical ...”

“... permit him actually to deny that there is necessity in nature. Similarly, Strawson argues, for the self and external objects: all we really know of them is contained in our ideas, which fall short of what we routinely take ourselves to know, and which fail to supply the basis for the kind of understanding claimed by certain rationalist philosophers of the ...”

“... who despised Kane and wrote that he was ‘peevish, coarse, sometimes insulting ... the most self-conceited man I ever saw.’ Berton’s purpose is not to debunk heroes and heroism, but he knows that under sustained pressure (duration is crucial here, and was a crucial element in all 19th-century explorations – most expeditions took years rather than ...”

“... decently fatherly but inconsequential letters addressed to his own younger, apparently scapegrace self, even though he promises us in his florid introduction that the Nabokov archive which he presides over will yield at least one more volume of letters, addressed to ‘émigré literary figures, his parents and his wife’. The trifles from that future volume ...”

“... scene of many meetings between Pym and Harvey, as her diaries reveal). Adam’s ineffable self-centredness recalls Archdeacon Hoccleve’s, and provides some mild comedy which would easily translate into a form of affectionate teasing. Cassandra is so worshippingly submissive that she can hardly be seen as the vehicle of violent disappointment. She ...”

“... the eldest child in the family. His father was ‘rowdy, quarrelsome, awkward, improvident, busy, self-assertive and too clever by half’, in Urry’s estimate. He appears often in the local records, sometimes in positions of minor responsibility – warden of the Shoemakers’ Company, sidesman at the parish church, constable at Westgate – but more often ...”

“... each country. But today these centres have become victims of their own success: each has become a self-sustaining ghetto, too occupied with its own problems to communicate with other ghettos. The next stage in the history of the West is going to involve a massive incorporation of non-European culture, the abolition of the frontier between the exotic and the ...”

“... illustrations cunningly interspersed with the text. The style is quite simply unique, sometimes self-indulgent, unfailingly imaginative, usually irresistible. This is not so much a chronicle as an assemblage of brilliant set-pieces (the fall of the Bastille, the Tennis Court oath, the assassination of Marat) intermixed with little stories of some of the men ...”

“... is stuck with pop music, junk lit crit, trash TV, just as he is stuck, really, with himself – a self shaped not by action or direct experience but by a kind of bombed-out cultural passivity, a wry/glum putting up with what’s on offer, what’s served up to him, week in, week out. Soccer fans are nothing if not passive. The games they go to hardly ever ...”