“... Labour Party but the whole Ukanian notion of ‘class’, which here denotes a sort of lumpish, self-encapsulating and self-perpetuating corporatism: knowing-one’s-place erected into social theory and a servile national identity. Less a nation of shopkeepers than of butlers – the most that can be said of a true ...”

“... to the Enlightenment, and to do with new emphases placed on individual experience and ‘the Self’. To do with walking in high places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less ...”

“... stub of a piton hammered in by the first person to tread this way thirty years before), and with self-images. On a climb that frightens me my self feels to myself like an overheated cave; doubts of my adequacy flicker and dart like a maddened bat; not until this uncontrollable soot-black monster deigns to retreat into the ...”

“... may be less contentiously characterised as the belief that the capabilities and the demands of the self are disproportionate to its circumstances,’ The reason this agreeable solution to the problem of solidarity is so hard to attain and maintain is precisely the friction between our public and private lives. ‘To obtain the means for our material support we ...”

“... he will never be entirely dead. In family histories such simple pleasures can easily turn to self-congratulation – the kind, for instance, that led to the male Stracheys’ smug sense that ‘the Stracheys are most strongly the children of their fathers, not their mothers … it does not matter whom they marry, the type continues and has been much the ...”

“... instruct us not to assume that what a writer says is simple autobiography. If you’ve got to have self-referential fiction, you might as well have it in the form of Dennis Potter announcing his death on his chosen medium and going on to describe his imminent posthumous work about the dissemination of a dead writer’s memories via a TV hook-up between pickled ...”

“... knew was the ace in the hole. It was a sign of how far removed Giuliani was from his former self that he seemed genuinely to believe this. ‘The old Rudy – Rudy the Justice Department hand, Rudy the prosecutor, Rudy the occasionally diligent student of government – would have known that even a stacked [Supreme] Court was going to go out of its way ...”

“... further intensive but brief periods of therapy. After Lowenfeld’s death in 1985, she continued a self-analysis through her art, her written reflections and what she called her ‘pensées plume’, or ‘feather-thoughts’. ‘The cost of Parents fixation (one of the cost[s]) is your total inability to deal with siblings,’ she wrote in her diary in ...”

“... between us was important to us, but it is not important to the pictures. What is in them is self-contained and, in some strange way, free of us both. That day, however, when I asked him about the final images, he related an elegant and nicely self-contained anecdote. He had been away, he said, working in Switzerland ...”

“... been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation’. Not all writers would share James’s need for the ...”

“... a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.’ In a generation at worst of noise-makers and grimly professional professionals – ‘Les Maudits: the compliment/ each ...”

“... should be a committed participant in the works he observes, and the works themselves aren’t self-created or autonomous but precipitated in the crucible of society and history. ‘My position is that texts are worldly,’ he writes in The World, the Text and the Critic. ‘To some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are ...”

“... didact; but as rhetoric it remains unconvincing, largely because of its ingenuousness and lack of self-reflexivity. Much water has passed under the bridge since then. Aslam, in this unusually poised and illuminating novel, is rarely ingenuous. He decisively escapes the romanticism – despite, at first glance, seeming to edge close to it in his early pages ...”

“... shoulder straps’? As a modern young woman with a modicum of education and a decent allowance, self-fulfilment, not self-sacrifice, becomes her mantra. ‘Pretty mediocre’ at architecture, Pratt transfers to a course in journalism, vowing to become a writer. She joins the Tomorrow Club, precursor of International ...”

“... follow, more or less fabulously narrated; with light digressions, tense asides and much moody self-reflexiveness. The premise of The Double, Saramago’s most recently translated novel, is this: a man, a shy and gloomy history teacher, watches a video and catches sight of someone, an uncredited bit-part actor playing a hotel receptionist, who is identical ...”