“... he wanted to hear – only increased the agitation; Arthur recalled ‘constant vigilance and self-repression, for fear Papa should be vexed. I never said what I thought, but what I thought he would like me to say.’ Fred regretted that ‘with him we were … decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices … We ...”

“... novel. Rorty speaks of ‘unconscious selves’, which Freud never does, not needing the idea of a self or selves. Rorty does not speak of unrelenting and often violent conflict, and he refers to these putative unconscious selves as ‘the intellectual peers of our conscious selves’; as though far from being crude, or primitive, or instinctual – all words ...”

“... movement of a sentence, whose grammatical structure allows us to be both inside and outside a self-contained scene, a dramatic vignette with extension in time (‘and there were moments’) and space (the reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece). Like a painting by Renoir or Manet, this scene invites limitless speculation about the novels that ...”

“... concern with theory in cultural commentary over the last twenty years? Why has methodological self-consciousness become a more pressing issue for literary critics than the traditional labour of elucidating literary works? Why are names like Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Lukacs, Kristeva, Althusser, Lacan, Habermas, Bloom, Jameson, invested with ...”

“... comparable vocabularies and linked concerns whether his immediate subject is the developing self or the revolutions of society. Geoffrey Hartman has been probably the most eminent commentator on Wordsworth since the publication in 1964 of his important and influential Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814. The Unremarkable Wordsworth collects 14 essays ...”

“... that motivate human beings. Liberalism is an ideal that has triumphed, and it is central to the self-identity of America. Americans can, therefore, feel confident in the future whilst they hold to the ideals of democracy and the free market. No wonder ‘Endism’ has gone down so well: it has provided a sophisticated rationale for the commonplaces of ...”

“... was taking up much of her time. These early stories, often heavily autobiographical, show her self-conscious, aspiring, fascinated with great or striking women – her male narrators, like her male pseudonyms, allowing her to write freely on female character and appearance – and hating conventional femininity. She moved on from journalism to translating ...”

“... syntax remind one of Larkin and even Andrew Motion. A more surprising influence is Eliot: ‘My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark’ has the sort of rhythmical hysteria and claustrophobic shadowiness that Hamilton has made his own; and a line from ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ – ‘Her hair over her arms and her arms full of ...”

“... container it forms is not only obedient to the law of completeness, but organises its contents as self-sufficient, owing very little to the aesthetic world around it. Not surprisingly, then, Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity, produced for her exhibition at Hanover’s Kestner Gesellschaft, nearly replicates the Guggenheim’s catalogue for its ...”

“... pain and revolt us, but for that very reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in 1874: ‘he was one of the most thorough and hollow humbugs of the age; false and flashy in everything; with pinchbeck poetry, pinchbeck learning, pinchbeck sentiment; stealing ...”

“... ends with the title-poem, a long meditation which readers may want to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see ...”

“... motor normality. Now he could keep a job and not upset his friends, but he felt that his tic-free self was less exciting than his old Tourettic self; he had from an early age built his life and personality around his affliction. The solution was to take Haldol during the working week but go cold turkey at the weekend, thus ...”

“... What Pritchard offers us, in place of Thompson’s overdrawn portrait of an irremediably self-involved man, is an impressionist sketch of a somewhat more human, intermittently affectionate, yet disconcertingly feckless, husband and father. The behaviour Thompson depicts as chilling careerism Pritchard treats as the charming insouciance of a truly ...”

“... to be explicitly asked for and there was no real hope of returning it. What was left of Ghali’s self-esteem sank lower and lower. That he felt his financial position to be degrading, that till the end he wished to be the ‘vrai gentleman’ he had been taught he should be, can be seen from the meticulous accounts he kept and his expressed last wish that ...”

“... The Pebbled Shore will disappoint those who hope to learn of tensions caused by Lord Longford’s self-imposed missions to Myra Hindley and ‘Reg and Ron’ (as the Krays are referred to in his books), by the great anti-pornography campaign or by the advent of Harold Pinter into the fold. The book ends in the mid-Sixties, just as the author, in full literary ...”