“... classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are, on the one hand, no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class . . . As for ...”

“... even during the emergency – many extreme measures should remain off-limits. Nevertheless, the self-conscious design of an emergency regime may well be the best available defence against a panic-driven cycle of permanent destruction. One thing only is clear. There is no chance of a carefully modulated response unless we take some critical distance from the ...”

“... be time to retire this little observation. Like Dave Eggers, Smith is interested in contemporary self-consciousness. Insofar as she is a moralist, she is a moralist about this. She is always pointing out that her characters, on the brink of a momentous access of feeling, are undermined by their sense that they are not being original, that TV has preceded ...”

“... held out. We’re a-helping Lyra,’ Hester says. ‘Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.’ Pullman’s range of emotional registers is immense. He can describe and attach value to tidying up your room, as when Lyra runs off with the Gyptians (who travel in long-boats) and has to ...”

“... to me, ugly in their strangeness.’ Though Javo’s strangeness marks a banishment of the self to some deep and unknowable realm of experience, Nora traces that absence on the surfaces of his face: on his extravagantly burned, scarred skin; into his violently blue eyes, their pupils wide and whited out by dope; across the ridges of his skull and his ...”

“... fashionable clutter, there reigned ‘a sober solemnity … a softened and subdued light illumined self-communion’. Rapture was only achieved through unrelenting physical effort, to the point of exhaustion, expressive less of passion than of rage. Delacroix’s building had been a gymnasium, and Baudelaire imagined him locked in athletic combat with the ...”

“... to a woman he hopes to make his lover. He wishes to explain himself, and embarks on a Rousseauian self-analysis that occupies all but the final pages of the novel. Though Félix comes from an aristocratic family, he has much in common with Balzac: he is an overlooked younger son, and endured a lonely and miserable childhood, neglected by a cold, distant ...”

“... 1675), commits to a tactic he had earlier only toyed with: to set an internal picture as a wholly self-contained block within his own composition, uninterrupted by foreground forms. Thus we see a rectangular firewall of gilt mouldings isolating a bucolic vista from the surrounding whitewash. The landscape is distanced – a hillside looked down on, its little ...”

“... A telling reproach, whatever one’s view of souls. A fine teacher! He knew the proper medicine. Self-righteousness would never be the same, It ceased to be a right. He could never keep his pipe alight, Smouldering matches rained about him. Once he gave it up, to discipline the spirit. His aunties told us over tea and cake:     ‘Because he burnt a hole ...”

“... Liverpudlian’ plays self-mockingly on the idea of ‘pool’. I was born in Liverpool. I would be flattering myself if I claimed that you need to be a comedian to survive there. But Liverpudlians do, like punsters, switch things about: they breathe through their mouths and talk through their noses. They are physiological, existential twisters ...”

“... soil, dig, drill, and lay it down; That’s why the villain loves the villanelle. The enamoured self is soft and needs a shell Though mentors and tormentors seem to frown; Because it’s hard, you want to do it well. Sportsmen and travellers are inclined to tell The scores and challenges that didn’t get them down; Not why the villain loves the ...”

“... Highdown Hill and sits in the open air. In The Child that Books Built (2002), Francis Spufford’s self-portrait of the author as reader, he tracks his journey from picture books to teenage comics and his first encounters with pornography. His childhood was lonely because there was sickness in the house: his baby sister had cystinosis, a rare genetic ...”

“... its thrust – would have been that, just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is a self-evident fact, so you shouldn’t base your opinion of anything else on surfaces or first impressions: you can’t judge an accused man by his physiognomy. Fine. But as the number of books jostling for readers’ attention has grown, publishers have toiled to ...”

“... rather two), ‘there is no meaning but something like a dream of meaning.’ Snatches of self-reflexive commentary are scattered throughout: The sentences not only undergo the normal deprivation of their intrinsic value and communication capacity but acquire acceleration and a centripetal and centrifugal force at the same time. It’s obvious that ...”

“... this, holding out against the dread prospect of statutory regulation. However, several bits of self-serving chaff get thrown into the picture here. One is the idea that journalists, as self-styled talkers of truth to power, should be above the law – the law against bribing the police, for example, or breaching ...”