“... watchmaker, musician, international go-between, entrepreneur, secret agent, pamphleteer, self-appointed diplomat, publisher and gunrunner – with brash, self-serving zeal. Even his literary reputation seems rather shopsoiled. His fame rests on Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only ...”

“... on a lead tablet in order to strike a group of doctors with unemployment is a more embarrassing (self-) image. The erotic spells can be vivid: I bind you, Theodotis daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake and by the mouth of the crocodile and by the horns of the ram, and by the venom of the asp and by the whiskers of the cat and by the penis of the ...”

“... This is the story of a goatherd who progressed through destitution and self-education to become the printer of the first edition of Calvin’s greatest work and one of the most respected teachers in Reformation Switzerland. It is also the story of his son, who trained as a doctor, fostered a household of four children, and died leaving 42 musical instruments, a set of skeletons and other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower ...”

“... with The Other and that there are half-baked metaphysical maunderings rattling about behind the self-conscious strangeness and writing-bum-on-a-wall prose. The benchmark for Charlieunclenorfolktango and, to a much lesser extent, Canteen Culture, is Irvine Welsh’s sprawling bent-copper novel Filth. When it was first published in 1998, the word-of-mouth was ...”

“... is the sort of book that attracts descriptions like ‘metafiction’, ‘fabulation’ and ‘self-referential’ – words that came into vogue at the same time as ‘ego-trip’. Plausibility is not attempted. None of the tales told are any good. They break off in confusion. They smell of midnight oil, not of improvisation. Two of them are in ...”

“... and symbols of loss, purity, fidelity and conflict. Student Skidmore, prime object of his later self’s ironising attentions, is living out a year of emotional turmoil in a New Zealand paralysed, not so much by the dock dispute of 1951, as by an Establishment of such stuffy self-righteousness and intellectual vacuity ...”

“... right and left, a political battle in the narrowest sense. Or it may seem a conflict between the self-interested conservatism of men, and the imaginative radicalism of women, who, if they are feminists, tend now to present themselves as revolutionaries or nothing. Unsurprisingly, such dichotomies do not help us greatly in settling, at a practical ...”

“... was to render this crisis with a calm savagery and clear-eyed shamelessness that reject self-pity and special pleading. E.M. Forster, who knew his way about this adolescent crisis, but who believed there could be beneficent muddles as well as vicious ones, seems actually to have thought Denton Welch too much in control and deficient in muddle. On ...”

“... years of the war,’ he writes, ‘de Valera’s attention was dominated by defence and national self-sufficiency. He stayed aloof from one of the few wars in modern times that really did involve the victory or the suppression of an evil creed, but he did so by adopting the same criteria of self-interest that governed the ...”

“... in its assumptions, economic and legal constraints and, finally, its power to awake loyalty and self-discipline, a noble family was then a major and possibly the decisive determinant of its members’ behaviour. The family of the future Choiseul had one characteristic, by no means unusual in his age, which was important for his career: its ramifications and ...”

“... and Barth’s friend, Ambrose Mensch. A rival candidate for the doctorate is Andrew Cook, ‘self-styled Laureate of Maryland’, an appalling versifier and a devout right-winger – though some suspect that these manifestations may be the ingenious cover of a dangerous revolutionary. Cook himself, of course, A.B. Cook VI, is one of the novel’s seven ...”

“... Most of Waugh’s routine ploys are on display here: the ingenuous parade of chumminess, the arch self-deprecation, the mock-antique diction that evokes a politer world than – he suggests – can be easily envisaged by those he’s being impolite to: in short, the apology that bites more nastily than the original offence. And then, to cap it all, the ...”

“... anything to welcome it. This is very odd. The impression left by Skinner’s Introduction is of a self-perpetuating cycle of talk about talk, of ‘changes of theoretical allegiance’ which have little to do with the advancement of learning but much to do with swings of intellectual fashion, self-conscious displays of ...”

“... this partly reflects the primitive agony of seeing the victim’s incomparable tragedy. The ‘self-regarding’ element in one’s grief at the death of a loved person is thus supplemented by an ‘other-regarding’ element concerning that loved person, even though the two elements may be extremely hard to disentangle. The death of somebody one did not ...”

“... only to themselves. The business of educating yourself out of this condition parallels the ethical self-training that all writers of fiction undergo. When, in Money, we meet the character Martin Amis, he seems, in his fully developed selfhood, a curiously stiff and priggish figure (‘I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I ...”