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“... of widely held opinion, it fails to convince as drama. Desertion displays an academic’s self-consciousness about the story being told; and the sudden replacement of one cast of characters with another risks bucking the reader. But it is a well-judged form of self-consciousness, which ultimately pays dividends. The ...”

“... he tossed trash out the car and seemed to think this was a daring move.’ Ella’s idealised self can make whipped cream desserts with French names. But when they arrive in California they are at a loss, and adopt ‘a crooked, raw arrogance’ in response. Finally, they find a home in the San Fernando Valley, Lou opens a shoe-shop and Ella becomes ...”

“... poetics of ‘still extent’, of finding and growing, are related to his understanding that a self is never a self on its own (as he writes elsewhere, ‘To know the place you have to disturb it/With your touch’). Although he often dwells on the way things come together or come good, the activity or motion of his ...”

“... You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces homogenisation, or worse, Disneyfication. The Golden Jobby would disgrace the skyline of any city; there is nothing particularly ‘Edinburgh’ about it, or about the new shopping centre that ...”

“... smiling. It’s a tragi-comic romantic image: is he dressed up for a particular person, or is this self-fashioning a case of art for art’s sake? In another black and white photograph, two women ride a scooter in printed dresses, one wearing sunglasses and one without; elsewhere, a man with black bell-bottoms, a black turtleneck and blazer carries a guitar ...”

“... When Marlowe met a different reckoning. He had been his usual snorting, railing, Blasphemous self, but loyal to his calling, As they all had to be, to live so well. He sang a noisy song before he fell, A dagger stuck in his eye after the feast As though the Cross had got to him at last. They saw each other home after his death. The rats had tired, the ...”

“... Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness – to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms. Images of exchange, and of untrammelled nature. But if we’re to become part of it all, won’t our paradise also involve participation in being, say, diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks on August pavement, weird glow of service areas along the interstate at night? We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons, and the thick treads of burst tyres along the highways in Pennsylvania: a hell we’ve made to accompany the given: we will join our tiresome productions, things that want to be useless for ever ...”

“... The self-appointed guardian of our streetstands all day in the doorwayof the house opposite,glaring at everyone who passes.His job is making sure the sun never shineson his side of Raleigh Street.He holds out his hand for rainand storm clouds gather to his cause.I spoke to him onceabout some misdirected mail I’d received,saying my own mail sometimes went astrayto nearby Raleigh Mews ...”

“... of all the novelists and of all their characters, issues an unquenchable whine of unction and self-pity, which is varied only by the grinding hum (as of bluebottles busy with a summer turd) of rancorous complaint. The grievances of homosexuals, like those of unmarried mothers or the Leyland workers, are interminable and unassuageable. ‘The hearties ...”

“... celebrities write the most interesting books: Robert Browning’s Pauline, for example, was self-published and, Browning later boasted, didn’t sell a single copy. Moss says that Rushdie and McEwan’s new books ‘will be the publishing events of September’, but that’s not the same thing as the best novels, and I would read The Devil’s Larder by ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis’s Modernism refuses a provincial label. His intellectual toughness and taste for self-promotion and polemic were foreign to the amateurishness that, he believed, vitiated Bloomsbury’s insular Post-Impressionism. Vorticism, the movement he set up with Pound and others around 1913 after a break with Roger Fry, would probably have had a short life even if the war had not intervened ...”

“... It could look like a retreat from the reality of war – Ravilious was more than once accused of self-indulgence. A refusal to be shaken out of a degree of disengagement was far from unique; it can be found, for example, in Jocelyn Brooke’s fictional/autobiographical trilogy, for which Ravilious’s watercolours would be appropriate decorations.What is ...”

“... Solomon’s SealShaded by the self-seeded hazelsIn a back corner of our garden,To the right of the flowering currantAn unexpected Solomon’s sealI want to show you. Does it matterWhy such graceful bells are so called(Seals of a medieval document?)It’s May, and Solomon says: Rise up,My love, my fair one, and come away,Winter is past, the rain is overAnd gone, flowers appear on the earth ...”

“... wings on the water Of an absolute take-off. Half the world has gone south – It’s winter now. Self-insulated, Deathless, last of the early Irish hermits, I lift the hatch like a desktop And light floods in, A giant scriptorium, Sky and water. Antrim to the east, Its reef of lights. And the dot-dash-dot Of a pollan fleet, on the far horizon. And the ...”

“... We were sitting with friends. It was a sunny day. We were boasting about the local coffee. Strange self-congratulations, flat whites. These were friends we had only recently found our way back to. For a long time we were far apart. Did you all survive? On that first day of school, I mostly remember being terrified: the dark interior, the children in rows at ...”