“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s admiration for the community he’d rejected grew to mirror his contempt for the would-be assimilated Jews of the Western capitals, though he was himself just such a Jew. The Ostjuden came to embody an endangered world ...”

“... performed, and were pleased that a job that had to be done was done so well. National pride and self-confidence were renewed. I find this conclusion no less extraordinary than I found the concluding paragraphs of the Franks Committee Report, which altogether failed to engage with the substance of what had preceded them. Hastings and Jenkins produce ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in them herself. So her lack of education was no great disadvantage, and for an autocratic and self-centred woman she was a remarkably good listener. She was, however, inordinately jealous. D’Alembert’s defection to the Lespinasse establishment was seen as an unforgivable act of perfidy: had she not won him membership of the Académie Française after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”