“... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...”

“... out of, say, Gibson Street and into Woodlands Road to buy a pint of milk. The time, energy and self-importance needed to place oneself world-historically by resort to proper names is a time-wasting luxury activity. You just turn the corner and go down the road and, released from having to worry about your Place in the global sense, are free to notice more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aroused in them by the work of their predecessors. The Victorians, she reminds us, already self-consciously thought of themselves as ‘modern’, and they were as obsessed with the problems of the subject, of representation and of the status of language as the 20th-century writers who followed them. Armstrong does not cite T.S. Eliot’s celebrated ...”

“... oral roots and point to a range of elaborate rhetorical displays which make much of conspicuous, self-advertising tropes as well as innuendo, illogical leaps, systematic lying, focus on a word’s sound rather than its meaning, ‘needling’, talking ‘around’ a subject, parody and pastiche. The dozens, or the ‘dirty dozens’, also operates as a kind ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... boldness and ardour that had a high romantic voltage: yet there was also a deeply modern guilt, a self-castigating intelligence which stuck like a hook in the throat of rapture. The love begotten by the heart is a love that dances in its chains when it embraces intellect – love of the scrutinising brain. And the stone that’s always broken by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Church history, published in 1822). As for The Prelude, Wordsworth’s groundbreaking epic of the self, it would have appeared promptly, one assumes, in the enthralling, exploratory version of 1805, ‘instead of Wordsworth spending nearly forty years revising it, almost always for the worse’. The family would have published other important manuscripts from ...”

“... Wallace’s call for a more feelingful brand of postmodernism, though in different ways. Funny, self-deprecating and extremely clever in his journalism and essays,* Wallace in his fiction occasionally barricades his interest in ‘plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions’ behind uncompromising levels of reader-unfriendliness. Franzen, as he tells it ...”