“... literary, philological presumptions. But which faculties? Young and happy and a touch self-important, we decided it didn’t much matter. People who were interested would tell each other, would get to hear of it and come along.But now we hit a snag. Out of the blue and what will seem very late in the day, Iris said it would help her compose her ...”

“... movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in ...”

“... middle of fucking nowhere’, they’re under the control of three men: the vicious Boncer, the self-absorbed Teddy and the Godot-like Hardings who never shows up. In The Weekend (2019) the group is composed of three women in their seventies who spend Christmas at the beach house of their friend Sylvie, who died a year before. Lost without her, they ...”

“... like most Indian men he preferred to beat his wife or his children than assail himself with self-doubt – yet he had neither friends nor social outlets. He never went to the cinema, to restaurants, on holiday. He became, gradually, inevitably, trapped in his own private universe. As emotionally parsimonious as he had to be financially, he broke his ...”

“... the impression that she was herself present only as an observer. One guesses that she was both self-effacing and voluble, throwing up verbal screens to protect herself from exposure. In the new volume of her diary we can read about a holiday in Cassis where she and Leonard had stayed at a hotel with several other English people. The hotel exhibited ‘such ...”

“... becomes a little shadow of itself’. This touched-up portrait requires a darkening of Humbert’s self-portrait: ‘it was always my habit and method,’ he admits, ‘to ignore Lolita’s states of mind while comforting my own base self.’ ‘Dolores Haze,’ he avers ...”

“... Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on the subject. This notion I thought grossly self-indulgent. There seemed to be little reason to believe that at his age he could suddenly have found anything interesting to say. And there surely were enough books on Shakespeare already, many of them dull, many of them silly, without the addition of another ...”

“... designs or marketing. Seeking a change of publisher was less like a fresh start than a sort of self-sabotage, since it risked the new book being separated from his back catalogue, especially damaging in the case of a trilogy. The Information was published by Flamingo in 1995, but Amis was back with Cape for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there ...”

“... was, however, an epoch of unprecedented epoch-mania. Nothing was allowed to be its own individual self; everything had to be interpreted in terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was ...”

“... unsound, but it springs from something he knew about his own creativity. Yet his strength was not self-disclosure. Although he never subscribed to the Modernist cult of impersonality, he rejected the idea that poetry is self-expression and argued that even the lyric voice is dramatic. During the postwar years, when his ...”

“... puppets, cakes, bandanas’.Some of these things surely belong to pre-existing categories such as self-expression, personal style, craft or community ethos. A smart new haircut obviously isn’t art, if art is also Rembrandt and Sylvia Plath and Stockhausen. Not all art has to be dark or difficult or epic or anguished; as Eno said in his Turner Prize lecture ...”

“... writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the ...”

“... fee – people have tended to assume that the transformation which occurred in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how ...”

“... whole thing was thrown back in their face: sacked for being too competent, ignored for being too self-effacing, poorer for being too parsimonious, or merely alive and jobless for not taking enough drugs to ensure the best career move of all. Alone, experienced (the titles say it all), the patient bass players are the ones who eventually knuckle down to the ...”

“... living as a reviewer and journalist. In these final years, scarred by drunkenness, sickness and self-hatred, Stafford’s chief pleasure seemed to be venomous attacks on the absurdities of what she sneeringly called ‘Fem Lib’. She despised the feminist in herself, the suspicion that growing up female in 20th-century America had anything to do with her ...”