“... then, a long line of writers has emulated them, creating a genre which has become increasingly self-conscious and prone to advertise its literary affiliations. It’s a style of writing that lays claim to a certain dignity: it aspires to rise above journalistic opportunism in order to delineate enduring characteristics. Where it once spoke of ‘national ...”

“... against Schoenbaum’s apparent relativism is accompanied by a sense that if his more visibly self-conscious precursor erred, it was actually on the side of sentiment. On the few occasions when Honan finds reason to correct Schoenbaum (which he does with a quiet but clear satisfaction), it is always to extirpate some residual romantic indulgence. The ...”

“... Pasquerel, whom Joan chose as her confessor, had met Joan’s mother on pilgrimage. Joan ‘lacked self-interest’, yet ‘loved display’. She burst into tears when insulted by an English soldier as ‘the whore of the Armagnacs’; yet ‘no one reports a single tear shed either in her cell or under the pressure of the interrogation.’ Gordon is not ...”

“... mythic biography.’ Its mythic qualities make this story, which in many ways defines English self-understanding, more than English. There are recurrent, prefabricated mythic patterns in the Robin Hood corpus, set pieces such as the episode of shooting an arrow into another man’s arrow, which Knight calls both archetypal and phallic. But he fails to ...”

“... was always a Gandhian notion. It was an acceptance of the carefully constructed and self-serving imperial model of two dominant religious communities in permanent conflict. This was a travesty of Indian history, but served a variety of political needs and soon became acceptable to every side and was the justification for Partition. Nehru ...”

“... of its time, is the language used in fiction by Arthur Koestler or Victor Serge to express the self-abasement of old Bolshevik victims of the Great Purges. The Prophet Armed describes Trotsky’s rise and apogee, from his birth in a Jewish farming family near Odessa to the summit of his power and influence at the end of the Civil War in 1920. From his ...”

“... creates, in Hanta, his subtlest ‘idiot’. Hanta may also represent the closest Hrabal came to a self-portrait. (Hrabal, like Hanta, rescued books from the compacting machine, and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.) Hanta’s wide reading allows Hrabal to use all the mental resources of his hero, however ...”

“... with chainsaws. It was all rather cosy, with a smug we’re-all-postmodernists-now note of self-congratulation to it. But then again, it’s true, we all are. It isn’t known why Eccleston decided to leave after only one series – bluffer, carpet-bagger, victim of the (aren’t they always) ‘gruelling’ production schedule? But the BBC was quick ...”

“... isolated. Haffenden reminds the reader that Empson believed the true writer has to sustain ‘the self-centred emotional life imposed by the detached intelligence’, but ‘the price of the detached intelligence is painful isolation.’ Still, in one way or another he had a good life, enjoying the fun but capable of intense and rewarding work; not immodest ...”

“... stance work where social and economic breakdown is endemic.’ Or: ‘this task’ – of active self-government – ‘must be undertaken in ways which avoid the dangers of populism.’ Or: ‘Governments that try to pass the buck for failure can only succeed if like Margaret Thatcher’s Administrations they are able to blame others, often those most ...”

“... this novel) to found a new movement on the ashes of the old one. The somersault was thus a form of self-destruction all along, anticipating the suicide whereby Patron removes himself from his own regenerated movement at the novel’s conclusion. But I would rather not characterise it as sacrificial, any more than I would like to lapse into culturalism by ...”

“... grasse norm; it was a whole-curd product ladled by hand into its mould; in the mould, it was self-draining, not pressed; it was matured on the farm (unlike both Livarot and Pont l’Evêque) for a period of between ten days and six weeks; it was about the same size and shape as it is now (round, weighing about 250-350g, and about 10-11 cm in ...”

“... to most historians conclusive evidence of the Marian regime’s shortsightedness and instinct for self-destruction. Yet the case can be made that in 16th-century terms the burnings were inevitable, and that they were efficiently carried out and persuasively defended. The regime had to break the back of Protestant resistance, and pressed the device of painful ...”

“... nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.Twitter has been disastrous in this regard, hurling the authors of critical academic discourses into the same arena as op-ed writers, politicians and members of the general public, without any mediators or translators ...”

“... verse that spanned Scots, English, Gaelic and Latin, Muir wrote in ‘Scotland 1941’, a poem of self-lacerating denunciation, that Burns and Scott were ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ where extreme Protestantism had led to ‘No pride but pride of pelf’ (the archaic noun ‘pelf’ is an example of the antiquarian diction and cadences that dog even his ...”