“... 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 ...”

“... matters but about fishing – he cannot keep away long from what he has read, almost like a self-taught man. In A Poor Man’s House, having explained, quite adequately, the ambiguity of the relationship between man and the sea, he cannot resist garnishing and endorsing his remarks by quoting Baudelaire’s ‘Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la ...”

“... can change destiny; another man with his service revolver and pluck can change it another way; a self-sacrificing woman can change it a third way. Everything balances on a knife edge. It’s a thrilling world view and at the same time a deeply consoling one, vindicating as it does the ordinary individual, the efficacy of personal action and happy ...”

“... myself as an out-and-out racist when I say that it is permeated with a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness – Auden’s governess lying awake and giving the universe nought for behaviour. Children’s books have always been particularly vulnerable to the crackpot theorist because they are so often a projection of an adult’s views about how the ...”

“... and how the obsessional inadequates who dream it can be turned to dollar-fodder. It is also a self-fulfilling prophecy to the power of roughly n, in that Gay Talese is going to make more money out of writing about pornography than any poor buck-a-fuck hack ever made out of writing pornography itself. Thus, in its distastefully complete ...”

“... truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle forms until the plain truth stands revealed. We ...”

“... which limits women’s creativity to the domestic and maternal. The conflict between her wish for self-expression and her guilty resentment of her husband and child finally drives her mad. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was based on a pivotal experience in Gilman’s life. After the birth of her daughter Katherine, she had a severe post-partum depression which ...”

“... a more general weakness in both books. Gilroy accepts the ‘radical contingency’ of black self-identity – the way in which acts of ethnic self-definition have in large part been shaped as responses to white racism. His account of that white racism, however, is thin, and over-dependent on the ...”