“... was humanly as dead as mutton. This being the case, Africans were clearly without a capacity for self-development, and it was to remedy this otherwise fatal deficiency that the great colonial mission was really for. So it was said from lectern and pulpit, and so it continued to be said. Despite the democratic upheavals forecast for colonics in the Second ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for it in different ways. Because we cannot help having dissimilar beliefs and desires, it was self-evident that nature and nature’s God meant us to pursue our happiness in our own, unique manner. That was the reason for our inalienable right to search or not to search for our salvation here or hereafter as we saw fit. There was much confidence in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... forming intricate and often fragile patterns of stabilising relationships. She is sure that self-interest, be it in the form favoured by Hobbes or by today’s rational choice theory, won’t do. Naturally there can be some meeting of minds out of pure self-interest, as in a fiercely controlled structure like a ...”

“... see – with the depth and passion of his earnest glance – the real nature of his gifts, of his self, and of his truest material, has become able to transmute his very misunderstandings into art of a crystalline honesty. The Enigma of Arrival newly constitutes Naipaul’s claim to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since ...”

“... those that warrant none, is actually a bit of a relief played against Fonda’s beatific and self-righteous Wyatt (think Earp), a.k.a. Captain America. But Billy’s meanness and scariness are startling. It’s possible to argue that it’s what redeems the otherwise self-indulgent film. Billy and Wyatt were never ...”

“... bad to worse. I was 24, I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; and the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented. The whole business of being Irish in England seemed to me old-fashioned and, in tiny ways, ghastly. People thought I was amusing, in an ...”

“... careful, but be careful not to seem too careful: Dec. 14: Lunch with IH. Shifty fucker, absurdly self-conscious. Ate next to nothing and pretended not to drink. Even so polished off two thirds of bottle. Indifferent muck, thank Christ – not that he’d know. Wants something from me, I’m convinced, but what? Fidgeted throughout. Monosyllabic when quizzed ...”

“... The motive must be in part the journalist’s or historian’s drive to tell the story; in part, self-justification. But self-justification alone sets up reasons and excuses that the perspective of history is quite likely to mock. Diaries are usually far more self-revelatory than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... did not last long: as the body aged, its powers faded, until it became a shadow of its former self, halfway towards the half-life it would enjoy thereafter in the kingdom of the shades. The power of the body, however, was far more than the power to attract. A Greek man or woman would not think they were being superficial if they assessed someone according ...”