“... 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 ...”

“... is specialised (and not my specialism), but by this she means that the gentleman is not ‘self-divided’ – not, that is, torn between reason and emotion, the ideal and the actual. For the Trollopian gentleman-hero, there is no oscillation between the here and now and the remote and what should be: the world is of a piece. The benightedly ...”

“... and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer’s self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country: The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon ...”

“... that makes these poems so very demanding and difficult. While the language is charged with the self-awareness that distinguishes poetic language, these poems are not primarily self-reflective. When poetry is in some sense the subject, the process is more one of self-interrogation. The ...”

“... vulgarian, punning and burping his way through high society. But Hildesheimer’s way with this self-imposed assignment has none of these depressing features. He admires Mozart above all other humans: in fact, he concludes his book calling him ‘an unearned gift to humanity, nature’s unique, unmatched, and probably unmatchable work of art’. He wants to ...”

“... of Beaconsfield, and confidant of the Queen. In poem after poem Byron had revealed the histrionic self-doubt and sense of evil which had goaded him from one extravagant action to another; he had then moved on to the wonderfully truth-revealing irresponsibility and mischief of Don Juan. The result? A European-wide reputation, and one great poem, certainly: but ...”

“... have no doubt tended to think that Kabbalism encourages superstition, emotionalism and self-indulgence. Much the same could be said of the flower people of the 1960s, who were also hankering after forms of religion with a dash of oriental extravagance about them. It was a suspect strain in Bloom, that his Kabbalism met the emotionalism of the ...”

“... arm of a heavily beringed dress designer: a man, it appears, of active sensuality verging on self-indulgence. Now compare the Irving Penn photograph for the back jacket of Music for Chameleons. Emaciated fingers delicately support a frail skull: without their help, you feel, the head might simply snap off. One hand, indeed, supplies the vertical ...”

“... type of novelist (and had something of the same order of talent) as the Old Firm, writers whose self-conscious dandy persona pervades their work, who cannot detach their own personality from the world they have created, who, indeed, are always in danger in real life of being swallowed by their creations. With Kennaway, though the rhythms tend to be ...”

“... even a public deceitfulness, but rather that the high-minded propounders of liberal ideals, the self-satisfied advocates of ‘procrustean virtue’, as he occasionally puts it, are self-deceived. But, once more, if that implies, as it surely must, that they are blinded to the reality of the world, then we need a rather ...”

“... and that notoriety tends to deter readers who might have tried, so that the legend is self-perpetuating. On all sides, it is acknowledged as some sort of masterpeice, but it is clear that not all who praise have actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted ...”