“... Lessard describes it all with unbridled, mystically tinged lyricism. Her book is overwritten, self-indulgent and humourless; cute, mawkish and pretentious by turns, but far from unreadable, and with some powerful and effective passages. Her insights can be strong, some of her descriptions are good, and her excesses are not due to naivety. For years she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... buccaneer capitalists and the waning of political power in the Thatcher years. The Century of the Self (2002) traced the way in which, during the course of the 20th century, Freud’s notion of the unconscious was recruited for a consumerist model of society in which politics became a matter of tapping into people’s desires. Two years later, The Power of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”