“... to scorn the efforts of anyone who just dabbles, particularly if the dabbling looks like academic self-promotion. Significantly, those who have made a real difference to Ruskin studies over the past 20 years have not come from within the British university system. The courageous work of Helen Gill Viljoen, first of those who dared to challenge the magisterial ...”

“... lost skills and teaching all kinds of restoration. After initial problems, this became a self-supporting success. When James died in 1984, Monkton and its surrounding acres reverted to the trust and were sold off to provide further capital – despite some opposition from those who wished to preserve it as a Surrealist monument. Its owner was buried ...”

“... about the Labour Party suddenly has a fresh and convincing answer: John Smith, the elected leader, self-evidently calls the shots. No doubt he would have preferred, in time-honoured style, to stitch up the block votes in advance behind his rule changes, had he been able to do so. Instead, he found the consolation of demonstrating his mettle in the initially ...”

“... noses (we can decipher his will to manipulation without such help), but to lend him the gift of self-commentary. At one point he tries on a striped waistcoat worn in a film of The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘ “I like,” he said obscurely, “I like – you know – to slip in and out of me ... Me and not-me.” ’ But this is not quite ...”

“... is exacerbated by Selbourne’s ostentatious contempt for his intellectual betters and a degree of self-regard that the author of a much better book than this would have no title to. ‘Given the scale of the moral and social crises which beset us,’ says Selbourne, can we turn (in a brute world) for guidance, ethical or practical, to an Isaiah Berlin, a ...”

“... to say and said it.’ How you value that process depends on how you value that form of deliberate self-expression – so popular in the 20th century – which contains a large element of the mere expression of opinion. Speaking of Aldington, among others, Wyndham Lewis fairly says: ‘it is not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very ...”

“... and again about lower-middle-class gentility (rural Canadian rather than urban English), and its self-obsessed obedience. Like his stories, Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them. These thieves struggle against the pieties and self-satisfactions of ...”

“... reciprocity, whose absence haunts each one of us at some level, even prompting fantasies of the self as a surviving twin. The possibility, however fragile, of such an intense and benign duplicity remains a fundamental component of the modern imagination: ‘for some, its very definition’, according to Schwartz. In this charged atmosphere, even World War ...”

“... and guilty desire? I don’t think he has yet quite explained this to us) a complete, unflawed ‘self-presence’, in which there is no place for the morbid and intrusive Other. ‘Self-presence’ is not a very happy nor a readily understandable term, though it is one which both Gasché and Norris frequently find ...”

“... eloquence, for all that, is Prufrock-like, and his stories are finally static and inhibited by self-consciousness. These are funny, despairing vignettes which describe our universe without ever actually daring to disturb it. Dora, one of Kate Pullinger’s protagonists in Tiny Lies, is in the habit of embarking on fact-finding missions. Instead of ...”

“... occupied by them for a century and a half; it survived thereafter only by being incorporated as a self-governing unit into the Habsburg Empire, benefiting from Habsburg military protection but successfully resisting administrative rationalisation. As anomalous exemplars of what might be called ‘state-unbuilding’, Poland and Hungary have been conveniently ...”

“... that has attacked his face ‘seems to have been of a mongrel, indefinite kind’) and self-centred, he thoughtlessly brings his wife to an early grave. Blind vanity causes the suffering which becomes moral redemption, as he is ‘consecrated anew by his great sorrow’. His theology had been ineffectual, but his grief unites the parish. Amos’s ...”

“... herself quoting Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. She/they were doing away with the old humanist self as ‘constructed’, in one of the book’s most-quoted passages, ‘on the model of the self-contained powerful phallus’. Now, she says: ‘I don’t think I can have believed this when I wrote it. I don’t understand ...”

“... exercise of any nice feelings on her part. No doubt there is more to her than the frivolous and self-absorbed spendthrift depicted in her late husband’s diary; but he was evidently determined to show this picture to the world if it would boost sales. Similarly, their daughter Petronella must have acquired some competence in becoming a successful ...”

“... be faulted for glossing over the scrounging, the fiddling, the fecklessness, the delinquency, the self-deception and the wilful irrationality which are as authentic a part of the picture as the unmerited hardships, the gratuitous humiliations and the irremediable, self-perpetuating lack of opportunities for ...”