“... to think of Hardy as a contemporary of Eliot and Pound, a rooted but cosmopolitan writer, a self-taught craftsman and a poet. One of the best chapters is his discussion of Hardy the ‘laureate of engineering’, in which he suggests that technology, far from being something Hardy escaped, was a force he allowed to shape his aesthetic. Davie, like Pound ...”

“... 20th century. For Williams it was not a sleep exactly but a lurid dream, an unbroken series of self-aggrandising and self-justifying fantasies. And now for the Whopper of the Week, or if you prefer, the clearest symptoms of what Williams’s Dr Freud (‘One of the things I most enjoyed about Sigmund was his sense of ...”

“... In Professor Anscombe’s case at least, it is assumed that if there are such experiences they are self-intimating. What she seems to find questionable is whether they exist. However that may be, she assumes that, in the Goethe example, the only points at issue are whether he witnessed the events in question and did not need to be reminded of them. If these ...”

“... problem – though incredibly rich in some areas – was patchy, and blurred by a good deal of self-deception. He asked: what is the general structure and connection of human motives, including the unconscious as well as the conscious part of them? There is nothing wrong with this question, any more than with Darwin’s about the Origin of Species. Both ...”

“... reveal themselves to be tawdry bits of stuff, unspectacular to the point of ugliness outside the self-referring mirrors of the machine. So when John Lennon wrote and performed the prophetic early song ‘There’s a place’, it was not he but the group voice that was felt to be confiding ‘There’s a place where I can go / When I feel low, when I feel ...”

“... What will Ono do? Ishiguro gives a delicate and wholly convincing account of the evasions, the self-justifications and the pride of a man willing to bend with the breeze, but accustomed to a position of dignity. Through Ono’s mental detours, and the little hypocrisies of those around him – his daughters’ deferential and half-mocking manner towards ...”

“... Is there no room for pure thought or for free speculation? Indeed, is there not a whiff of self-contradictoriness in the notion that philosophy is merely the study of its own history? Students of the history of ancient philosophy may add a further complaint; for the scholarly studies of Gadamer and his disciples have received only sporadic acclaim ...”

“... Olivares in more ordinary language as ‘impulsive and strident’, with a penchant for ‘self-dramatisation’ (as his letters and memoranda make clear), as a ‘man in a hurry’, and as ‘a restless, ambitious, hyperactive man, who wanted to be everything, know everything, do everything’. He describes the contradictions, or more exactly the ...”

“... repetitions, digressions and effusions; in re-creating the style, which he describes as ‘full of self-regarding modesty and feigned folksiness’, he says he has aimed at the tone of mid-19th-century American magazine and diary-writing. It reads spankingly and is tolerably free of forced modernisms or archaisms. Sand was around fifty when she was writing it ...”

“... and a deeply-envied model. Even in the Fifties and Sixties there continued to be a veiled self-satisfaction in economic history courses. Today the self-congratulation has gone. The question that has dramatised and well-nigh traumatised our approach over the past decade is the negative one: how have we come ...”

“... one who has seen most. Of all the characters in the book, Wairimu is granted the most developed self-consciousness, so she emerges as the everywoman figure, the character whose destiny the reader takes to be representative, and around which the destinies of the other characters group themselves. The novel begins where Wairimu’s story begins: on a ...”

“... Exchange in due course taking an interest. Lloyd’s of London, on the other hand, has always been self-regulated. What is at issue here is whether insiders in Lloyd’s (the working underwriters) took advantage of their position to subject outsiders (external Names) to excessive risk, or even actually to defraud them. If not, Lloyd’s have no case to ...”

“... come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements rarely compensate, often seeming more past than achievement. Even for ...”

“... wrote Lincoln Steffens. ‘She was large; she dressed as a large woman ... You felt ... her self-contentment and shared her self-composure, but, best of all, the prophetess gave you glimpses of what a Buddha can see by sitting still and quietly looking.’ This is the pattern of Stein’s extraordinary legend; she ...”

“... the more public dancer and bather pastels accorded their subjects a greater degree of modesty and self-respect. ‘It was in his monotypes,’ Richard Thompson observes in his study of the nudes, ‘rather than his pastels, that Degas most overtly exposed the female body to the male gaze.’ Callen disagrees. Her aim is to demonstrate that these diverse ...”