“... of another of Knight’s agents, a Belgian girl named Hélène de Monck. I don’t think it was self-aggrandisement that made Joan Miller put herself exclusively at the forefront of the action, but plain misrecollection after forty-odd years. When she read the Sunday Times article she admitted certain things were wrong; characteristically, she held the ...”

“... Leeds United play but disappoint their fans week after week, which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem and taking a short cut home through these graves here they reassert the glory of their team by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer. This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit. Subsidence makes the obelisks all list. One leaning left’s ...”

“... that the attempt to create images of heroism will often give way to the acceptance of that deep self-mockery which is at the root of the stage-Irish figure. Both local and international literary practitioners in Ireland know this well. It would be possible to list them in sets in relation to their repudiation or acceptance of that mockery and the roles it ...”

“... of them, mask an underlying simplicity, uniformity and rationality. Faced with this immense (but self-imposed) undertaking, the modern philosopher of language has equipped himself with a number of intellectual tools, of which the sharpest appears to be a radical distinction between two kinds or levels of meaning. He distinguishes between the ‘sense’ of ...”

“... blighters, the Stoics’ – must denote for them a poetry of political compromise and impotence. Self-accusing as he is, Walcott would probably concur. ‘Praise had bled my lines white of any anger,’ he writes in a poem from his new sequence, and promptly demonstrates this by treating the events of 1981 as the stuff of decorative analogy – leaves ...”

“... and down-to-earth witticisms: he notices Lincoln’s almost physical need for laughter. In his self-restraint, Gore Vidal does not even make a great scene of the killing. The rage of Lincoln’s adherents has been vividly described by Walt Whitman, with the cry of ‘Murder!’ ringing through the playhouse, the white-faced widow shouting in her box, the ...”

“... represented as the result of its place in a larger system. So both criticisms are directed against self-contained atomism, and both replace it with a kind of holism which treats some of the features of interconnected things as the products of their interconnections. However, though it is easy to see how this change explains his critique of the all-powerful ...”

“... It is no longer ‘a pleasure to go down into the stations of the Underground’. Rasmussen’s self-confessed Whiggism now seems more distorting than illuminating. Selectivity may be necessary in writing about London, but what conviction can a general argument about the city carry which is made by ignoring slums, suburbs and poverty, as well as ...”

“... the sequence of chapters, giving to each a structure, and a title, which suggest a succession of self-contained episodes, several of them being individual ‘ghost stories’ in their own right. (It must however be said that the greatest mystery of all, which survives the end of the novel, is that the chapter with a reminiscent title, ‘Whistle and I’ll ...”

“... for which the dictionary industry itself is responsible. What is unfortunate is that the war of self-advertisement between rival firms has had to be based on conning the public about the nature of lexicography. Thus, for example, if the consumer consults the Oxford Miniguide entry for the word scabrous, he will be told in no uncertain terms: ‘Scabrous ...”

“... This stimulating fantasy may be useful for Hakim’s education, perhaps. The idea about self-styled ‘people’s parties’, Nazi or Communist, echoes a quotation from Mussolini’s theorist, Argento Soffici, which appears as one of the 20 epigraphs to the chapters. At Edenvale, outside the classroom, there are other political matters to concern ...”

“... merely into his colleagues’ frailties, but also into the chaotic, unprincipled, sentimental and self-interested forces which are the true inflators of public expenditure. Part of his excuse for dwelling with such apparent distaste on so many close colleagues (this one an abominable bully, that one an ingratiating but manic populist, another a commercial ...”

“... Professor Hsu, a Cantonese, had gone to the States as a labourer when he was a teenager. He was self-taught in English, had financed his own studies and had become a professor of English. With the birth of the new China, he came back with his whole family and had been working as a teacher of the language. His English was much better than his Chinese – his ...”

“... rhyming ‘persona’ with ‘landowner’ but Thomas’s ‘face ... Shining with pleasant self-esteem’ is surely a fresher rendering of the squire’s physiognomy, and the same might be said of other passages in the two versions. My small acquaintance with Russian does not extend to the subtler nuances, but I suspect that in these and other ...”

“... but there was also an ideological and intellectual anti-semitism. Some people derive a sort of self-justification from denouncing Jews and from creating or sustaining an anti-Jewish mythology; and this was made more respectable – or systematic – by a number of left-wing thinkers who were known to be anti-semitic: Fourier, Toussenel and Proudhon all ...”