“... Fifties, has been slowly maturing not a well-tempered masterpiece but the garrulous, profligate self-celebrations of a precocious adolescent who never grew up. It is not even clear why the novel ends where it does, since ‘let us pause’ is all the narrator says in the middle of his last paragraph. Few of those lulled by the publicity into buying this ...”

“... clear, coherent, profound, shocking.’ Is it? Or is it just another barrage of bombast whose self-indulgent hyperbole undermines its own insights? I take it for granted that no one is going to deny this late in the day the underlying premise that women have been oppressed down the ages, and that sex has been one of the instruments of that ...”

“... new body can be if one is to remain the same person. I may feel I’m most essentially a mental self, that my identity is in some deep way independent of my body, but ‘I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship,’ as Descartes observed. ‘I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form ...”

“... how far we should see these poems as the limbs of Osiris, to be gathered into the unity of one self, story or structure. That was once the favoured approach to Modernist poetry; but Motion’s poetry is, in some ways at least, Post-Modernist. It gestures towards a coherence that is not achieved, that breaks down in blankness, disconnection and ...”

“... and red wine don’t always go happily together) – or did I simply cave in without the need for self-deception? Either way, there are difficulties in explaining my behaviour, and the book goes through these in a systematic way. First, irrationality is defined as ‘incorrect processing of information in the mind’, and is sharply distinguished both from ...”

“... all about pain, and his prostate is normal. The book that finally helps him solve his problem is a self-help volume he learns about during his predawn scrolling through pelvic-pain message boards. Called A Headache in the Pelvis, it explains that all his symptoms can be attributed to chronic clenching of the muscles of the pelvic floor, and prescribes a ...”

“... uniformity. Even his great legislator, his new Lycurgus figure, who was to form a people fit for self-rule, has no coercive, but only didactic powers. The object of the Social Contract is to ensure the freedom of the joining citizens. That freedom is not, to be sure, Montesquieu’s freedom from governmental power, although Rousseau was just as determined to ...”

“... and Graham Greene. Both create an entirely coherent romance world, powered by variations on self-satisfaction, in Greene’s case masquerading as self-disgust. In both cases this is highly transmissible to the reader. Every decade has its own style of romance, discernible as such in retrospect while seeming like real ...”

“... seem quite happy to confer a universe of delay, and unemployment, on others, partly as a form of self-protection. Here the possibility – as with so many so-called neuroses – that delay is a struggle for health, or at the very least a way of stalling disease, is not permitted. You’re late. You’re out. Hamlet, no less, sees into another area where the ...”

“... hand, watching the birds and animals before beginning his chores. This is how a father should be, self-possessed, reserved, with ‘nothing to say, nothing to show, nothing to prove’. When Mike asks about his own father, he says: ‘He’s dead’ – knowing that he has given a far from complete account of his condition. When a man becomes a father he ...”

“... Laura Bush, and sympathetic to her political non-choices, has been getting attention alongside the self-exonerating memoirs and withering insider analyses piling up in the final weeks of the Bush presidency. In its positive assessment of the couple’s marriage (fictionally presented as healthy, affectionate and hot), its willingness to leave ethical issues ...”

“... almost impossible beauty of these men – all of them white men – shown naked on the page. Self-portrait for the ‘Don’t Touch Here’ exhibition announcement by Robert Mapplethorpe (1973) If you were also very shy, as Robert Mapplethorpe was (born in 1946, he was in the 1960s still a very young artist making jewellery, collages and assemblages ...”

“... on his way across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to view the latest (and last) of his self-portraits, the rather gaudy and saddening Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (and Orange Shirt and Purple Sweater-Vest), where the almost unrecognisably pinched-looking painter has lost a couple of hat sizes (as if a lifelong ...”

“... in Middlemarch. Moreover, in its elements of husbandly pride and disappointment constantly self-excused and of wifely activity, compensating yet self-effacing, it was one of many Victorian marriages (one thinks of the Carlyles) which showed the strains of the age, with its changing expectations of and for women in ...”

“... child might be one of her terminated conceptions, but it’s more probable that it’s her former self. The poignancy works – just – because she has plunged us so deeply into her story, into her soul (a term she uses without irony). She does manage to hold her work this side of mawkishness and self-pity, and when she ...”