“... 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 ...”

“... madness or bitterness or humiliation, it’s not a camouflaged homicide or a grandiose display of self-loathing – it’s the finishing touch to the running gag ... For anyone who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. There is panic as well as levity in this stuff, of course; there’s nothing funny about realising which things are funny. And the ...”

“... childhoods. Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). At once passionate, meditative and intensely self-reflexive, Landscape set out to challenge the sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy ...”

“... so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find societies where, for a while, ideals prevail over self-interest; restraint over self-indulgence. That it was so in Dorchester is Professor Underdown’s fascinating discovery. Early in the 17th century there was an extraordinary fall in the number of bastards born, or at least ...”

“... is an enormously important person historically, more important than his own cheerfully truculent self-estimate. It is a cliché of left liberal conversation that the mildest reform politics is impeded by what is called Essex Man, the self-seeking, ...”

“... is no why to it, only a here and a there.’ ‘How circumstantial reality is,’ Updike wrote in Self-Consciousness, his book of memoirs. ‘Truth is anecdotes, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian.’ Snug for Updike and his male heroes, we need to add. Alf’s writing, as the inventory above may begin to suggest, is full of delight in the evoked absurdity ...”

“... rhetoric and flourish, he too often allows these two-edged gifts to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic stance’ (Eavan Boland); ‘I have found Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy ...”

“... oil’. Cal swears in French whenever his guilt or nerves give way; in one instance he reveals his self-hatred in the expletive series: ‘Merde. Crotte de chien. Merderer.’ Mac Laverty’s diction is part of a linguistic exhumation, a verbal archaeology: the ‘whorl’ of an ear, the ‘tuggy’ toast, someone ‘thran’. The heroine is Catherine ...”

“... Andrew Wiles, a Cambridge mathematician living in the United States, emerges after seven years of self-incarceration and paranoid secrecy from his Princeton attic, clutching two hundred pages of hieroglyphics. He is triumphant. He has cracked the most famous problem in number theory: Fermat’s Last Theorem, which has eluded some of the finest efforts of ...”

“... first person that rubs against the excerpts from Michel’s tormented writing and his own fits of self-importance. Moments of fine physical observation sit awkwardly in a ludicrous account of how the institutional world works, while a very Victorian use of coincidence, magic and destiny does a measure of spiritual duty, as well as rounding off the plot. Some ...”