“... look at the astonishing way Laetitia recounts it. Such a mixture of blood and bustle, authorial self-congratulation and familial quarrelling, of pathos and ‘Hock and Sack mix’d’ has not been compounded since literature began. Mrs Pilkington’s story shows how easy it was for a man to commit all kinds of sins within a marriage, and in getting out of ...”

“... Lama quotes Candrakirti’s doctrine that animals are afflicted by the same false notion of the self that prevents enlightenment in human beings – a possibility which few of us will have mulled over on our own initiative – yet the same medieval Indian thinker also has important if extremely difficult things to say on the nature of reality. For the past ...”

“... with a master hand, and it is built like no other music of this or earlier ages. So profoundly self-educated that it may seem to deny the very existence of those colleges and conservatories in which the young Górecki spent many arduous years, it is a music without social graces or pretensions. It is – to be as blunt as Górecki himself – the music of ...”

“... flagged floor I notice a crust of wheaten farl and wonder if a visitor dropped it, or is it some self-conscious exhibit like the peat fire? Is the Folk Museum in Ulster or is Ulster in the Folk Museum? Should there be a great big old-style TV camera hanging over it? That evening I head out to meet two postgraduate students and pass the new concert hall, a ...”

“... did each day and what he wrote. He seems, Donoghue writes, ‘sentence by sentence, a textual self in the art of becoming’; and this makes him grist for the modern mill. There is nothing outside the text, certainly not a man who sits down to breakfast. And yet, paradoxically, all of Pater’s writing attests to the necessity and the enigma of the ...”

“... representation was adjusted to purpose. Individuals were to be discouraged from bloody-minded, self-centred behaviour by being able to satisfy their needs in different kinds of organisation, each appropriate to its purpose. In France, there was a tradition, which began with St-Simon, of thinking of industrial society – not ‘capitalism’ – as ...”

“... the spectacle of himself believing, and not that he believes ... he remains egocentric, busily self-conscious in defiance and remorse.’ A fellow pilot, who was himself badly burnt, also saw through the pose. ‘In my opinion,’ Geoffrey Page told Hillary, ‘you’re still as bloody conceited as ever.’ Soon after he had been shot down, Hillary’s ...”

“... length, and damn the pressure on space. A certain genre of novel, labelled poioumenon – which is self-begetting, writes itself as it goes along, and explores ‘the limit of narrative truth’ – contains, we discover, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus, Vanity Fair, The House of the Seven Gables and Pale Fire, as well as lots of ‘Post-Modern’ writing by ...”

“... who emphasised the private qualities of life and spoke of old values such as equality, fairness, self-help and tranquillity, and the technocrat, the manager, the master of statistics, the prophet of unlimited progress. The lesson of 1981, as the sociologist Bernard Cathlat put it, was that the definition of ‘progress’ had to be revised. Yet within three ...”

“... he is convinced that the memorial tributes to the recently dead brother are ‘filled’ with ‘self-pity’. That the second son’s feelings for his older sibling included a measure of competitive aggression seems probable enough, though Edel so insistently drives home the point, and so exaggerates its determining force, that one is tempted to discount it ...”

“... 1910 to build up a genuine political partnership with her husband Charles, despite her years of self-education for the purpose. Brushed aside by this progressive Liberal politician, she needed an outlet, and embarked in July 1910 on a life’s work in embroidery, estimating in her diary that ‘it is going to take me 30 years to finish it.’ The ...”

“... intellectual ambition, domestic defiance and sexual autonomy’: but this is surely too crude and self-serving a portrait to accept at face value. Or, to take another example: to assert that ‘during the post-war period, the female malady, no longer linked to hysteria, assumed a new clinical form: schizophrenia’ is to damage one’s own case by engaging in ...”

“... admits: ‘A peaceful campus, only marginally concerned with Vietnam, became desperate.’ That self-concerned desperation was imported all over the world, eloquently and efficiently. Such is the nature of ‘student ...”

“... the constraints of the old public service ethic were virtually non-existent. These get-rich-quick, self-made men from the South-West brought to politics the same instinct for corner-cutting that they had shown in their business careers, and the Administration was quickly acknowledged as the most corrupt since Harding’s. The extraordinary resilience of this ...”

“... of her in London, represented in For Love Alone, brought back an adolescent sense of failure and self-loathing. She punished herself, walked everywhere to the point of exhaustion, and wanted to die. One of the illuminating sidelights in this biography is the brief account of Rowley’s 1987 visit to the Helping Hand Home in Adelaide to hear retired Professor ...”