“... their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony’, are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka. And in an even more striking formulation, Saer says these characters have ‘a distant kinship with certain heroes of Dostoevsky’ because of ‘a particular sensibility to vileness, their own or ...”

“... it isn’t hard to guess where he is heading: Darwin’s ‘noxious ideas’ about ruthless self-interest had, we are told, ‘a direct and disastrous influence … on Hitler’ and on ‘the social programmes of the Third Reich, culminating in the Holocaust’. You do not have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist to think that natural selection will ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a dog, and try to combine them into a big class of their own, the class of classes that are not self-members: then you have the result that this class is a member of itself only if it is not and is not only if it is. Contradiction! Red alert! The concept of a class reveals itself as intrinsically paradoxical, hardly a solid basis for mathematical ...”

“... explained in terms which are, to say the least, peculiar. Thus Nellie Macmillan stifled the True Self which she might have allowed her son to develop, and provoked him to construct a False Self as a protective mechanism. The compliance he showed her, as the price for her reciprocal semblance of love, ‘was the earliest ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Ulster News I feel a voyeur, a political tourist. It’s then, for whatever reason – self-disgust, self-consciousness, that guilty intermittent sense of whatever breathing down your neck – it’s then when you’re in company that you start to stir things and the late-night arguments begin. A gaggle of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... equates this scenario – the New Woman as ‘predator, rebel and neurotic’, dominating a ‘self-doubting New Man, whose very passivity makes his heroism problematic’ – with the male response to feminism, and the creation of a male protagonist who is both ‘passive and exemplary’ is his touchstone of male sexual vision. When he is considering ...”

“... serious interest in Ireland. In the meantime, however, the United Irishmen were pushed back into self-reliance, manifested in Robert Emmet’s attempted insurrection of 1803. Elliott gives this as much space as Hoche’s expedition, though it had no concrete connection with France. Like the rest of her book, apart from broad-ranging introductory and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it. Not even Oscar Wilde assumed the name, Who called himself both genius and poet. That he was self-appointed to his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the ...”