“... awareness among the other Chilean students of its psychological aftermath, makes Richard’s self-obsession seem rather pathetic, but Tóibín chooses not to offer the reader a moment even of denied awareness on his part. One section ends with a fellow student’s account of Raul’s torture: ‘He told them the names of his grandparents first, they were ...”

“... enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway. But what makes ‘Chatwin Revisited’ an honest homage and not just an assassination is its author’s unillusioned estimation, as a fellow travel-writer, of his own ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... top five American titles (behind Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant and ahead of Burn after Writing, a self-help book composed of mostly blank pages with writing prompts meant to prevent oversharing on social media).The publishers bidding for American Dirt were responding to an ambient yearning for books and movies that combine popularity, commercial ...”

“... New Hampshiremen Robert Frost and e.e. cummings. Creeley’s work is characterised by a tortured self-examination, and an almost panicky need to engage with interior experience by enacting it syllable by syllable, as if any misstep will send the whole poem up in flames, and perhaps its maker too. This is the poem’s drama, and it hardly ever seems ...”

“... the government busy at work’. The mise-en-scène may be modest science fiction, but the mode is self-conscious post-Chandler noir. The narrator is Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heel private eye – the ‘I’ in this case standing not for ‘investigator’ but ‘inquisitor’ – with low karma, less cash and an unhealthy make habit. His sex life has been ...”

“... rush of cinematic violence, but it’s driven by Arm’s turbulent inner life, a mix of tough-guy self-assurance and clumsy longing.Asked by an interviewer why all the stories in his first collection focused on young men, Barrett admitted it was ‘a limitation’. His new book shows his efforts to expand his range. Women are at the centre of a couple of the ...”

“... of a threatening natural space for a protective chapel ‘evokes sanctuary in a paradoxical, self-cancelling form’. The connection may seem far-fetched, but Gawain raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. Like the miracle of the stag, it asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary can ...”

“... and the Daily Mail were among the newspapers that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank ...”

“... about what not to include – if in doubt, toss it in – and parts of this book come across as self-indulgent. In the book’s second section, as Sean goes to high school, it’s not particularly surprising that he becomes what those around him have told him all along he is: a first-class fuck-up. Dede lobbies to send him to boarding-school and eventually ...”

“... twenty years or so have seen a more and more open acceptance of their place in the city. Soho’s self-branding in the 1990s as an urban ‘gay village’ has become one of the capital’s major selling points. On www.visitBritain.co.uk, ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian ...”

“... only has he made a canny foray into organic groceries: he has developed what might be called his self-esteem. Another marital bust-up hasn’t done for him: he has lived in the States, the land of eternal optimists, serial marriers and career opportunists. ‘Transparency, efficiency, virtue, convenience and flexibility’ are his keywords, and though he ...”

“... of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this ...”

“... of their Society, and only when that Society had been radically transformed, and the original self-determination of the human species restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social ...”

“... great, leonine head of curls tilted above Dostoevsky’s Idiot’. Mary is shocked at Meredith’s self-assurance, since after all she is ‘somewhat chubby and very oddly dressed’, but quickly warms to her sophisticated literary knowledge and all-round brilliance. They form a friendship ‘based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing ...”