“... background accessible to the speaker it constrains; it is not an object of his or her critical self-consciousness; rather, it constitutes the field in which consciousness occurs, and therefore the productions of consciousness, and specifically speech, will always be political (that is, angled) in ways the speaker cannot know One might well wonder why we ...”

“... imitations, such as Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. The third passage, by now highly self-conscious, is the beginning of Katie Hickman’s A Trip to the Light Fantastic. Niña turns out to be a boa, and despite appearances this is not a novel but a travel book, running after magic in the reality of Mexico. Hickman’s excuse for this reversal of ...”

“... beginning saluted Israel’s ‘courage’ in granting Palestinians the right to extremely limited self-rule. (Even that is still far from realisation.) Why the victims of Israel’s policies of dispossession, occupation and repression should thank their persecutors for a grudging admission that they ‘exist’ is difficult to understand, although the ...”

“... up economically with other countries, the production of ‘thinking and informed people’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-discipline’. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of that ‘academic excellence’ we used to hear so much about. What is actually taught and achieved in maintained schools will be decided by ...”

“... rather than a builder-up of egos, her own included, which finds no favour with her. Her lack of self-love is striking in autobiography; towards the end, self-pity creeps in. But even that is part of her sensational boot-in honesty: she does not spare herself, deny unhappiness, or curry favour by displaying a socially ...”

“... how the rest of MacLean’s poetry is born out of war, out of the clash of warring elements of the self, and out of divided loyalties, as well as out of the heroic fight for the survival of his people’s language and culture. It is no accident that the last poem in this book, the recent ‘Screapadal’, is a meditation both on the clearance of Raasay in 1846 ...”

“... not having armed themselves’, as she puts it. Or for having been so obsessed with their sexual self-discovery that they simply failed to see what was happening beyond it. At the beginning of the book, Sara Maitland announces her search for ‘signs of hope and self-criticism’ to enlighten the Eighties, and praises the ...”

“... Lessard describes it all with unbridled, mystically tinged lyricism. Her book is overwritten, self-indulgent and humourless; cute, mawkish and pretentious by turns, but far from unreadable, and with some powerful and effective passages. Her insights can be strong, some of her descriptions are good, and her excesses are not due to naivety. For years she ...”

“... principal factor is the size and spread of the English language, which offers readers a delusive self-sufficiency. Why bother with anything else – apart from a handful of 19th-century French and Russian novelists, the only things that have ever really caught on – when there is so much to be read in English? Increasingly, it’s only English that ...”

“... Marie Darrieussecq’s first novel, Pig Tales, is the comic, sexual and cheery self-description of a ‘masseuse’ who gradually turns into a pig.* Fantastical metamorphosis mixes with grotty Parisian reality, giving rise to a Mad Max future of ruined cities and megalomaniacs. Its 153 pages can be read in an afternoon, and its themes are in tune with the preoccupations of readers of glossy magazines ...”

“... as a dramatist, Brecht’s example as a poet will always serve as a stumbling-block to poetic self-absorption, especially of the German variety. Grass’s distinction was to tread a wary path between Brecht and Benn’s positions through the turmoil of the Sixties and beyond. It was a balancing act with a superficial resemblance to the one practised by ...”

“... of the eel, than most people expect novels to supply. At the same time, there is no sense of self-indulgent Dickensian sprawl about these excursuses. They are properly canalised tributaries to the book’s total preoccupation with liquidity. The epigraph is drawn from Great Expectations: ‘Ours was the marsh country.’ But Heraclitus got there first ...”

“... various types, to people of every era. Beauty is a very different matter from fashion, grooming or self-presentation. Indeed, most women recognise the impossibility of achieving the highest beauty and thus – something of the sort was suggested in a few bare sentences by Theodore Zeldin in the second volume of France 1848-1945 – some fashion becomes a ...”

“... for wives.’ A wine-snob and a social snob, with mild literary aspirations, supercilious, self-dramatising and ineffective, Peterley drifts through some eight years, with little to look back on save a frigid marriage and the wrecking of the life of one of his mistresses (the Sydenham one, cast off for ‘dynastic’ reasons). It is by now Munich ...”

“... who finds himself in the thick of the latest Flaxborough murder. It’s a piece of miscalculated self-consciousness on Colin Watson’s part – almost the only miscalculation in the book. The Flaxborough Chronicles embody a great many of the virtues that make the golden-age detective story still one of the most widely read literary forms. They have their ...”