“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political memoirs are no exception, not least because so many of them are at heart exercises in self-justification. Writers, actors, sportsmen and everyone else who writes memoirs are telling their own story, but they are not usually, not primarily, doing so to justify themselves. Political figures, by and large, are. It creates a strain, and the strain ...”

“... Writer-translators with their own style and worldview might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ...”

“... largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto associated with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Heinrich their genius, but for his two sisters, Julia and Carla, it offered instability and self-destruction: they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul ...”

“... and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one is easily pleased with himself, the other suicidal. There’s a gambler, a concert pianist, a self-immolating artist, an anthropological linguist, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer. The world of the novel, previously so narrow and skittery and badly lit – the world of a depressed, frustrated woman stuck to her computer screen – opens out to take in ...”

“... as civilisational. They experience a more subtle and insidious form of oppression from their own self-critical gaze, constantly measuring themselves against the West (its science, its art, its movies, its soda pop), and invariably coming up short, haunted by what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘spectre of comparison’. On a trip to Venice as the ...”