“... mother when writing letters to her old school friends; they represent, to the daughter’s mind, self-conscious pleas for attention, powdery, pathetic appeals for love, for validation. She is enraged that her mother, who is dying slowly of a paralysing disease, can find the energy to pick up a pen and enter into a conspiracy with falsehood. ‘ “I have ...”

“... pleasures of both recognition and novelty: we see people we know in fresh contexts. The reader’s self-congratulation may be checked as he encounters characters beyond his ken, but this provokes the humbling and enhancing awareness that the range of texts that might be called literary is now so vast that no one could ever experience more than a fraction of ...”

“... is more than a chance echo, because both Benny and Maria have been listening to the same loopy self-help cassettes which offer ‘Affirmations and Actualisations’. The violence of their showdown in the final scene of the book exposes the terrible drive to power which such philosophies encode: to be in control of your own life, after all, you have to be ...”

“... gin and laudanum, but he had himself made attempts to write a novel, full of maudlin masculine self-pity, entitled And the weary are at rest. In a lucid moment he wearily admitted that ‘composition’ required rather more than ‘the smoking of a cigar and the humming of a tune’. No, Emily was a solitary, although swaddled not unwillingly in the ...”

“... Richard Feynman was the world’s number-one physicist (after Einstein), a well-known genius, a self-described ‘curious character’ who was involved in some of the formative events of 20th-century science: the Manhattan Project, quantum mechanics, the birth of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman’s mind roamed over every conceivable branch of Science ...”

“... I have never mastered.’ Again, in a brief autobiographical note, she wrote of her much earlier self: ‘of me Mother was proud; the other one she loved.’ She sought love all her life, or wished to believe she did, but her self-absorption amounted almost to contempt for the love of others. Still, not liking Tsvetaeva is ...”

“... of this complex, cruel and sensuous culture is a constant undertone in the fanfare of America’s self-foundation outside history. And its fall, as replayed in the literature, is endlessly contemporary, from the menace of Injun Joe to the march of Margaret Mitchell’s carpet-baggers, from Faulkner’s tentacular Snopeses to Flannery O’Connor’s ...”

“... would say, by exciting themselves they excite others. Like the higher pornography, the higher self-pity – vital to any bestseller – is an important ingredient in Larkin’s popularity. There is nothing specialised about the excitement. One does not have to share homoerotic feelings to be excited by Housman; or, when moved by Larkin, to share his ...”

“... the story of a courageous and far-sighted but fatally flawed scoundrel, Vann; the account of self-defeating South Vietnamese corruption and ruthless indifference to military and political realities; and the history of American miscalculations and deceit in its longest war. In Sheehan’s skilfully constructed book, Vann is a metaphor for America’s ...”

“... of the Calvinist clergy: they could simply dispense with the clergy and keep their intellectual self-respect. The popular religion of the period was thus not so much anti-intellectual as anti-authoritarian: people wanted to think for themselves, follow their consciences and express their beliefs without inhibition. In this context, the ‘frightful grimaces ...”

“... wants to write ‘industrial’. In its accumulation and discharge of facts and its measured if self-conscious uniformity of tone his oeuvre has almost the air of a collective production, as though a single polyp, immolating itself, had somehow created a whole reef. Of course, Frazer is far from the only positivistically-minded 19th-century savant to prompt ...”

“... back to explore the nature of the universe’) and Mary Lynn Broe (‘To discuss only Plath’s self-sufficient system of poetic devices – even her imaginatively textured combinations that move organically toward energy – is to indulge narcissistically a kind of contextualism with some blatant indifferences’). The militant feminists have raged against ...”

“... institutions to their Roman source, Haecker saw Virgil as the inner pulse in Europe’s sense of self and destiny. In a different but related vein, and with Dante as central intermediary, the scholarship of Curtius and the criticism of Eliot extended this argument for Virgilian paternity. Our landscapes at evening, our manifold intimation of ‘town and ...”

“... to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to be shot of the tedium of ‘covering’ it, but nobody quite ...”

“... example, the darkening in ambient light of the surface of a cheek as it curves away from you), self-shadow (the dark side of a half-moon) and cast shadow (a hand making a rabbit on the wall by lamplight), we are already some way to understanding the basis of the rules painting manuals offer – for instance that the shadow a figure casts on the ground will ...”