“... men are mortal; Caius is a man; therefore Caius is mortal.’ Ivan tried to get back to his old self – the one that existed before universal truth became personal – but could not. Tolstoy defines the moment – the crossing of a border into the land or the dimension of mortality – that is at the heart of all subsequent writing about disease. It is an ...”

“... is in the end something quite forlorn about Baudelaire’s ‘fastidious’ dandy. An utterly self-involved figure, unwilling to be ruffled or possessed, wary of ever spilling over the sides of his every choreographed response. ‘As concerns the sense of touch, he studiously avoids … any tactile contact with the other, unless it be in anger or ...”

“... the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh ...”

“... brevity and indirection’, Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic, it manifests a fundamental tension between ...”

“... Ape, Freud, Darwin and space travel are condensed into one ape embryo – ‘a snug, smug, self-sufficient little incubus, in the middle of warm, wet darkness’. We watch Percy and Edwina’s baby launch itself out of the womb to issue its ‘first roar of wrath’.In​ 1954, Hackenfeller’s Ape won the first novel prize at Cheltenham Literary ...”

“... when no one laughed: ‘Before morning Your dear daddy will be Ibrox blue.’ The Forties ‘The self that has survived those trashy years’ Its ‘austere virtue’ magically intact. Well then, He must have asked himself, is this The ‘this is it’; that encapsulate Life I never thought to find And didn’t seek: beginning at the middle So that in the ...”

“... in the daffodil patch. walking through mourning days of a nitrous quality with the calm and self-possession of a ...”

“... another take; the pace accelerated and they caught the shock on the head honcho’s face as the self-satisfaction and conceit drained away, along with his life, and he didn’t like it. It had been one thing to deal, another to kill, to order others to kill for him; then to kill the assassin who failed in his mission. For years, not a hitch, then, in an ...”

“... of the English betrayal of Modernism, A Sinking Island doesn’t slow down to consider whether self-betrayal might not be more interesting and important than the other kind. At one moment Hugh Kenner, characteristically whisking all external phenomena into his pattern, says that in ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot ‘meets the shade of Yeats’. It’s true that ...”

“... of unquarried marble and ‘plane-tree-dimmed. ... hill villages’. But Clampitt’s dry self-mockery usually manages to disinfect illusion. And in ‘Babel aboard the Hellas International Express’ she catches rather nicely the sprawling placelessness of travel, a fallen cosmopolitan gabble along the Songlines, as she rattles from Salonika ...”

“... for Gordimer, essentially a matter of representation. In the process, what she calls ‘creative self-absorption’ must always be checked by ‘conscionable awareness’. Coetzee, however, doubts that the sort of literal reflection offered by Gordimer and writers like her tells us anything more real, or more truthful, than a more obviously imaginative ...”

“... Her dashing derivative manner is hardly more than the function of a permanent hopeful high self-consciousness. But its falsity, though innocent, is unpromising: so much so that there is a curiously strong relief when at moments the Sandra style breaks down, and another voice – though still not the novelist’s – makes itself heard. Invariably this ...”

“... and he wants exclusive physical love. One thing they do agree about: ‘I’m not going to be self-sacrificing,’ she says. Nor will he be, as he showed in Part One. There is an important consequence of this. If you are not going to be self-sacrificing and others aren’t either, then the condition of life with people ...”

“... of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine and Cobbett are left out of the story. The land, England within its ‘natural’ boundaries, is ultimately the key to everything. Rupert Brooke did not suppose that some far corner of a foreign field would be for ...”

“... the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was ...”