“... books. Disapproving parents loom, are disappointed and disappointing. A mousy mother – needy, self-abnegating and trapped – is often a foil to a distant and dominating father. Three Strong Women (2009) opens with Norah, a lawyer in her late thirties, arriving in Dakar from Paris to visit her father. Their relationship is strained. He shows her a ...”

“... many of his characters. Mihály could be seen as a wimp, and that is how he sees himself. He is self-aware, self-analytical, sophisticated and articulate, and these qualities are shared by most of the other dramatis personae. It makes a nice change from novels that specialise in heroes and heroines who can only ...”

“... terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation’; and there was a similar touch of self-conscious experimentalism in Shepard’s space cowboy persona. Bob Dylan, he admiringly observed, ‘has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own ...”

“... cultural circumstances are very different, much here is reminiscent of Beckett’s fictions of the self-enclosed, self-obsessed consciousness, the sense they convey that we are watching a man watching himself drift ever closer towards the abyss. Andrés begins by imagining, in morbid detail, the search party that will ...”

“... writes letters to David, the married lover she left back in England. Their affair is undone by his self-indulgence, the egoism that allows him to whisk Edith into the wings when she threatens his comfortable life at home: ‘She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself anything.’ Edith reveals nothing about the split. In the ‘enclosed world of the ...”

“... phenotypes are ‘massively modular’; therefore there is no such thing as the mind or the self; and (present company excepted) we are all self-deluding hypocrites. I’ll concentrate on 4), because it is the burden of Kurzban’s book, but I don’t believe a word of 1) to 3) either; in particular, I don’t believe ...”

“... thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?’) and self-conscious overwriting (‘Gob was dashed with horror, as if someone had filled a bucket with pure liquid horror and dumped it over his head’). The world of the novel is wildly inventive, with the emphasis on wild; it is the product of a brilliant ...”

“... Plot turns elicit a dazed ‘Jesus H. Christ’, and when the action flags the conversation slips self-consciously into neutral – ‘clichés and oddly reflective expressions’. Then there’s the always vital Banksian nomenclature: ‘Ronnie Skeeter’, ‘Dewey Knox’, ‘Hank Lank’, ‘Margie Fogg’. (‘While Jimmy’s been out there ploughing ...”

“... the emphasis or the grammar. This was an exercise in developing, within strict limits, a sense of self, what we would now call ‘subjectivity’. In engaging with the fables in particular, the student was learning about different points of view: although the ‘morals’ appended to them dictated the ideological message, the stories themselves told not just ...”

“... and then passed on as far as Carthage, carried the message of Mani (a Mesopotamian prophet and self-styled inventor of a world religion) with disturbing ease across the frontier between Rome and Persia. On top of all this, the ‘self-indulgent idiocy’ of the Christians showed what people who claimed to be good Romans ...”

“... reasons’, to create an entire book in a largely seamless approximation of Moat’s tone: self-pitying, self-justifying, sentimental, with strong undercurrents of violence – like one long Geordie country and western song. ‘The aim,’ Hankinson writes in his author’s note, ‘was to stay within Raoul Moat’s ...”

“... of Nigeria, in his Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), which promised ever greater self-government once Nigerian client-rulers had learned a sufficient sense of fair play from their masters. But Sa’idu’s offer to sweep up the damage he has caused is also a grotesque version of the author’s own situation as a white radical in West ...”

“... is only one of the problems besetting the Pricklebush community; another is its appetite for self-destruction. Flighty, selfish and ultimately doomed, Angel is grotesquely fluent in the rhetoric of victimhood even while squaring up for a fight with the Eastside faction, and her belligerent self-pity is used by Wright ...”

“... that is rejected as the book goes on. Keith, the man in charge, is the only one who seems remotely self-assured, but he ends up breaking his arm after trying to show off. The group put on a brave face, singing round campfires, competing for small prizes, kissing under the trees and squabbling about politics. As night settles over the forest, we eavesdrop on ...”

“... Greenblatt has moved on, or back, and not only from Berkeley to Harvard. He ended Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with an account of Othello similar in shape to his present account of Hamlet, but pretty unconvincing; Hamlet in Purgatory hits the nail resonantly on the head. As is the way with new historicist interpretation, both expositions proceed by ...”