“... novels between what ‘really happened’ and what happened only in the mind are in one sense a self-conscious replay of the same narrative impulse, remote as these novels are from the gentle world of Arrietty and Pod. The Gulliverian tall story similarly oscillates between a cheeky flaunting of improbability and protestations of veracity backed by ...”

“... hardships of home. Perhaps this is the novel’s bleakest moment: it is also one of affirmative self-discovery which unites Leila with the heroines of Paule Marshall’s novels. Selina Boyce in Brown Girl, Brownstones leaves Brooklyn for Barbados, where her father had inherited a plot of land. And Avey Johnson in Praisesong for the Widow digs deep into her ...”

“... have met elsewhere. His colleagues and BBC contemporaries included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to ...”

“... Rameau and the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, as a brilliant experiment in textuality, as an instantly self-deconstructing text. ‘Am I a prisoner in the midst of a sign or am I a spider at its centre?’ asks Herbert innocently, pondering the position of his bedroom window in the middle of the neon lights that announce the best pet shop in the world. He won’t ...”

“... dissection of their arguments, his unsparing determination to catch them out, as he often does, in self-contradiction, grants their thinking more respectful attention than it deserves. On the evidence amassed here, Woolf’s own dismissive contempt – ‘I cant conceive how anybody can be fool enough to believe in a doctor,’ she wrote to Violet Dickinson in ...”

“... their courage and their exhilaration at the success of Solidarity: it also explains a degree of self-obsession, a streak of fatalism, which seems stranger and more disturbing ‘under Western eyes’ – to turn Conrad’s phrase upon his native country. Outside the formal sessions of the conference, in which we discuss somewhat haphazardly the ‘Quest for ...”

“... and some norm.’ Granted that a preference, on the one hand, for personalities capable of self-control and remorse, without marked propensities for delusion or hallucination, whose sexual inclinations are directed towards persons of the opposite sex and the same species, and a preference for blood-sugar levels compatible with consciousness, on the ...”

“... contradictory. One ‘contradiction’ is that deterrence requires that ‘we seek to avoid our self-extinction by threatening to perform the act.’ But ‘we cannot both threaten ourselves with something and hope to avoid that same thing by making the threat – both intend to do something and intend not to do it.’ The view that Schell is here attacking ...”

“... seeking to identify the influences that shaped a body of literature come equipped with a self-destruct mechanism in the form of two beguiling but potentially compromising accomplices, the companion fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and the single cause. It may be merely a coincidence, after all, that it was only after the dissemination of ...”

“... to some extent on a small succession of supportive women. Lewis, although he made a brave show of self-sufficiency, lacked this independence, and was fortunate in possessing, beneath a carapace of bluff geniality and tireless contentiousness, an almost charismatic power of attracting personal devotion. He found his support in the first place in a small group ...”

“... of Science. These essays, specially written for the York Meeting of 1981, are more sober and less self-congratulatory than one would expect in a volume celebrating the 150th birthday of a venerable institution. Once again, the specific subject of the book is of less general interest than the light it throws on its historical context – the state of British ...”

“... Less obviously pernicious, but arguably no more helpful, is a long-standing form of ritual German self-abasement which ends by implying the opposite of what it states: qui s’accuse s’excuse. Hans-Magnus Enzenberger has written eloquently on this. At a higher level of moral and academic ambition, tough-minded analysis of the Third Reich readily generates ...”

“... of the period thought that works of art should have a rich symbolic content, but it is by no means self-evident that this was the case. The traditional justification for religious images is that they are the Bible of the unlettered, that they instruct and remind the faithful about their beliefs. This need not exclude symbolism of a simple, familiar ...”

“... occurs. All women like it, this theory insists, and those who say they don’t are hypocrites, or self-deceived, or so weird or old they don’t count. Sometimes this notion is accompanied by the belief that all women like to be roughed up. There is a tiny kernel of truth in these monstrous falsifications. Women, like men, have been known to say ‘no’ when ...”

“... towel to the floor in front of her. She was meant to see that he was saying something to her about self-exposure. The only cure for true love is getting to know each other better. Happiness and reality are irreconcilable. And yet – this is the trouble – they are a mated pair. ‘Woman,’ said James, reverting to spoken language, ‘lie down and die ...”