“... 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 ...”

“... a game which involves obvious falsification on a large scale, it is also one which limbers up self-consciousness, in players and spectators alike, and enlarges the scope of sympathy and inquiry. It is the same with writers in the past. Since the study of English literature has intellectualised itself, not altogether unlaboriously, great writers whose ...”

“... and that the heart of it is ‘Jarrell’s continuous presence, in his sentences, as a performing self’: but whoever enjoyed Wilde, or read Disraeli, for the plot rather than the wit? If you approach the book with hostility it can be said to show Jarrell’s shortcomings as a human being, but it seems mean to think about short-comings when the end-result is ...”

“... arty thriller appears to be using his counterpart of Messerschmidt to expound: the mystery of self – that human identity is radically unstable and not to be located, if it exists at all; and the madness of art – that, as the 1988 note in this paper uncontroversially put it, ‘madness combined with creativity is comparatively common among ...”

“... their lot with the Somoza dynasty, something never mentioned in the euphoria over the triumph of a self-styled liberal over a hazy Marxist in a freely-contested election. From the Sandinista point of view, the return of the Chamorros to power could not have seemed so very different from the return of the Somozas. When outsiders manage to seize power, their ...”

“... sentences too common in this collection: A practitioner of the meditation-in-verse and the self-presentational lyric, X attempts to infuse the commonplace with mystery and drama through conversational free verse and, on occasion, traditional forms. Does such a sentence about X’s procedures really tell us anything distinctive about this poet? Or is ...”