“... of thoughts totally uninfluenced by the existence of mechanics and their grubby mechanisms. The self-appointed cardinal, Arthur Koestler, ever vigilant for the appearance of mechanistic heresy, exploded with vitriol all over the pages of the Sunday Times when reviewing this book. There are those who would take such an attack as a compliment and a ...”

“... or freeing a rich Danish recluse from blackmailers, but beyond this they are voyages of self-discovery, quests for self-knowledge, searchings for one’s soul, ending in regeneration or rebirth in life, or in self-sacrifice and transfiguration in death. One would not wish to ...”

“... on the subject is entirely his own: it is not the revenge one minds so much as the perpetual self-glorification of these saints and martyrs and their profound impudence. How one loathes them in their ‘new white garments’. How disgusting their priggish rule must be! How vile is their spirit, really, insisting, simply insisting on wiping out the whole ...”

“... her only recourse is to victimise herself more shockingly than even her enemies can. And with her self-inflicted wounds she is supposed to win a kind of freedom. We encounter the heroine at the inaugural moment of her first messy period and awkward bra. As a girl, Sadie is neglected by a moderately amiable mother and abused by a drunken stockbroker ...”

“... at all, that her exquisite grace on screen derived from her instinctive projection of her real self. As with her fellow-narcissist Greta Garbo, the pull which Marilyn exerts for Eighties audiences has to do with a quality which throve in unreflective innocence and which is in these post-feminist days extinct. And the fascination of her story lies in the ...”

“... major preoccupations, and his lust for men was as distressing to him as his desire for women was self-affirming and ecstatic,’ Susan Cheever wrote in Home before Dark, published three years after Cheever’s death in 1982. It was the first public admission that ‘the Ovid of Ossining’, the man who once said his epitaph should read ‘Here lies John ...”

“... and the law of rape; standards of reasonableness, particularly in cases where provocation and self-defence are at issue; the position of black and Asian women and the interaction between sexism and racism; domestic violence and battered women’s syndrome, and so on. She ranges from the major questions (in what sense is crime or criminal law ...”

“... first has been variously interpreted: by some as naked, mean greed; by others as honourable self-deception, born of the arrogance of lust for fame. The incident becomes easier to understand when one realises that Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, though unprecedented in history, had a precedent in literature. In a Spanish version of the Romance of ...”

“... not have been murder. Both novels are cramped by the country house and by the agoraphobic woman self-imprisoned there. The reader is glad to come up for fresh air on leaving such claustrophobic narrative space. Whether those characters who are left alive by the final page will find exits and oxygen is less certain, though the prognosis is cautiously ...”

“... himself. He was a snob and a gossip and his letters are so laden with ambivalence, bitterness and self-loathing, so much studied nonchalance and self-absorption, that any respite fills the reader with a ghastly burst of gratitude. There are moments of kindness and forbearance in his correspondence with the novelist ...”

“... which was to have a profound influence on subsequent American attempts at cultural self-analysis. ‘America’, he began, is a young country with an old mentality ... But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always has a comic and unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds ...”

“... of 26 January 1900, celebrating the centenary of the First Fleet’s arrival, had a jubilant and self-confident view of themselves, not as the transplanted pawns of empire in exile at the ‘world’s worse end’, but as Australians, a lucky people, fiercely independent, with hope and initiative in their tucker bags. In spite of plague and hard times, grand ...”

“... too much latitude in the direction of high-sounding prose. In its poetic vein his writing tends to self-parody, to be portentous, and to create an air of solemnity which tempts irreverence. Ondaatje spent eight years writing The English Patient, a fact which his publisher reports as though it somehow guaranteed the novel’s quality, making Ondaatje into a ...”

“... Literature, where many readers have wished to keep him suspended. Clothes exist to remind the self of the body, and to create a worldly body for each person. Anderson connects them with Kafka’s interest in bodily states and qualities, both his own and those of his characters, as well as with his literary technique, with the skilful cut of his fictional ...”

“... to chat up his glamorous French co-hostess, who consistently squelched him as a total creep. This self-caricature is no more Clive James (who by his own account is clearly as attractive to foreign ladies as the next celebrity) than Edna Everage and her remarks about tinted gentlemen is the sophisticated Mr Humphries. One of James’s most effective tricks is ...”