“... you call fanaticism when you’re trying to be creepy rather than dogmatic. In one corner, the self-punishing, war-loving, homophobic (no connection to those ‘boy-loving’ Athenians) Spartans, who on grounds that escape me completely are meant to represent reason, justice, law, freedom and logic, to borrow a few grand words that appear in both book and ...”

“... proportion of the dozen or so pictures safely attributed to Fabritius are on show here: two self-portraits, The Goldfinch from the Mauritshuis, a sleeping sentry and the National Gallery’s own perspective peepshow. The finish of his pictures (also unlike Delft) is painterly, not smooth. In the goldfinch you can count the strokes – one for each wing ...”

“... undermines her ego and her lofty Saint Theresa aspirations. She starts her life’s journey to self-extinction and the unvisited grave. J. Hillis Ladislaw (né Brooke) would have ended up teaching at some godforsaken community college in the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps he would have become a Mr Chips, beloved by generations of school children. He would ...”

“... farce and brutal jokes pervade her works. ‘The search for identity, egoism, embarrassment, self-destruction, emotional blackmail’ are listed as the subjects that interested her most; ‘drift, inconsequentiality and anti-climax’ as her constructive principles. Revolt against the pattern of female submission laid down in the contemporary courtesy ...”

“... surface, the dichotomy pointed to by Mencken. One a British peer of ancient lineage, the other a self-made man who, through investing skill and fanatical diligence, became the richest of all Americans, in ‘essential character’ they were poles apart. True, they had certain obvious things in common: each had many marriages (four for Bend’Or, five for ...”

“... book, powerfully written, and certainly (indeed, remorselessly) clever: but one-tracked, and self-satisfied. It takes a traditional target, the bizarrerie of upper middle-class Victorian sexual behaviour, and blasts away at it with satirical vigour and relish: but the more points are scored, the more pointless the exercise begins to seem. Here we ...”

“... economists. The World, it soon seemed, was ruled by little else, or at any rate nobody else. The self-serving function of Keynes’s proposition is obvious. But the constituency whose interest it served, or whose self-esteem it bolstered, was simultaneously narrower and broader than that of Keynesianism as such. Even ...”

“... our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms and even the act of investigating and naming the self is both arbitrary and suspect. A lost language would mean a misplaced self; and indeed, Aron has caught a fleeting and provocative glimpse of a shadow father behind the father he knows, a lithe and animated Papa who is ...”

“... up the idea that you’ll ever again be prized? In a way it’s not so terrible ... You feel a bit self-pitying, a little angry, but it passes, it’s not so terrible, many people live that way ... I expected to live that way the rest of my life.’ But then she meets Clement and tastes desire again, and sexual pleasure, and risk, and the consequent fear of ...”

“... mutters a few lines later. And so it is in text after text: every stirring is stilled and every self-assertion leads to a self-cancelling. In 1974 Beckett published a piece called Still with which Stirrings Still has many affinities, though the more bracing and even defiant ring of the title of his new work is certainly ...”

“... privilege to Labour’s traditional constituency, the overarching concept of ‘community’, a self-evidently inclusive idea which is almost incompatible with class or social conflict – all are generated by a rhetoric of social harmony and commonality of interest and endeavour. This is a bold and admirable enterprise plainly worth trying. Were this a ...”

“... the duty of ethical probity that goes with it. The deconstructionist, more often than not, is a self-conscious outlaw. Thomas Docherty in On Modern Authority takes up the pose of the Noble Robber and gleefully uncovers an etymological affinity between criticism and crime. His aim is to redistribute textual power and authority to the dispossessed ‘readers ...”

“... in terms. Davenport-Hines sees the Post-Modern as the latest resurgence of Gothic – a self-confirming case to some extent, since he tends to read the latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of American youth – weird, gross, bizarre, wicked, scary – is certainly the discourse of Gothic, which before Modernism ...”

“... a rosy reflection of all whom we care for enough, the Other rendered perfect in a paradise of our self-love. If MacSweeney’s poem takes its measure from The Infant and the Pearl, it’s nonetheless a more desperate work, cutting away to contemporary horrors with intent to shock. In ‘Cavalry at Calvary’, written to the Guardian journalist Maggie ...”

“... preliminary conclusion that ‘To sum up, we can say that actions regulated by norms, expressive self-presentations, and also evaluative expressions, supplement constative speech acts in constituting a communicative practice which, against the background of a lifeworld, is oriented to achieving, sustaining, and renewing consensus – and indeed, a consensus ...”