“... 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 ...”

“... a cheerful fellow absorbed in his marriage pro spects, experiences such a fugue from his usual self when he shaves his head and becomes a wandering sanyasi. If The Guide is Narayan’s most accomplished novel, this is because it organises best the disparate states and transformations of its central figure. Raju himself pictures for us a number of different ...”

“... her own, takes to drink. To save her from degradation and childlessness Stephen, in a great act of self-sacrifice, drives her into the arms of a man, who marries her. Those were the days of Boots Circulating Libraries, and The Well only needs one adjustment, though an important one, to make it a first-class Boots book. This, in fact, has always been the ...”

“... his relationship with Fanny Osbourne whom he was later to marry, run parallel to a process of self-discovery. Though he wanted to be a poet – and he has written poetry – Richard Holmes is inescapably a biographer: oblique, vicarious, elusive, passionately suspended between two lives as he gathers material for an autobiographical narrative through the ...”

“... boy became an instant celebrity. We acknowledged Julie Burchill as the archetypal punk. She was self-regarding, bolshy and judgmental, and we were her proselytes. Every Friday in the New Musical Express she meted out punishment to ideological offenders, and came to represent for us the biological energy of the movement. At the beginning of Damaged ...”

“... he assumes that a lot of what he gets told about Mayta by his fellow-countrymen is made up. This self-sabotaging narration, however, is not here some gratuitous chic, learnt in Paris: it is an indigenous form of realism, because Peru is like that: ‘Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, take refuge in ...”

“... fates because a society run by men dominated them either directly or by training them to think self-sacrifice a virtue. You would be able to swallow it, however, only because you would be unable to guess that art history is, in fact, full of misattributed and lost oeuvres (masc. as well as fem.), apprenticed sons, and pleas like the one entered recently in ...”

“... characteristic of one kind of Stead character, the monstrous and charming egotist, ‘boiling with self-respect’, who is superb and ridiculous in wishing only for the simplest things in life: things like love, happiness and scope for the free play of a benign will. The novel begins with and returns to, as The Man Who Loved Children did, something like a ...”

“... for these flickers of understanding that women no doubt found so seductive. Eliot imitated the self-pitying voice of the disillusioned idealist. Both perversely ignored stalwart examples of womanhood close to home, and for the purposes of art hunted out those women of the drawing-room and slum who could easily be spurned as mental lightweights and ...”