“... reader of Waugh might hope to find ... everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ‘insolent’ publisher; if there is a charge against Methuen it could only ...”

“... incompetent interpretation of a knotty passage in Nehemiah. Toward women she behaves with the self-assurance of Flora Poste at Cold Comfort Farm: but feminist fashions have changed and, whereas Flora Poste would pretty them up with bras and make-up, Donna Lee prefers scrubbed faces and the anti-sex-object style. The whole book resembles Cold Comfort Farm ...”

“... But he was clearly determined to give himself time to decide what to do next; he was remarkably self-reliant. He married young and distanced himself a little from his exigent family, living for a while in Chertsey and then moving to Devon, with frequent visits to the West of Ireland. Years later he moved his household to Ireland. One fate he shared with his ...”

“... Yet he is wakeful, too – intelligent, droll, social, especially good at capturing snobbery’s self-grooming. He has a beautifully loitering instinct for form and sentence: his novels never hustle themselves to conclusion, or to heavily obvious theme. The Spell flows with all these qualities, but is not a very ambitious or driven book (and differs sharply ...”

“... see-through functionaries of the plot. There’s a droll exchange marking one of these twinges of self-awareness in an early novel called Cherokee – named for the Forties song, not for the Native Americans as such – between the driver of a Deux-Chevaux and his captive passenger: ‘ “We could take you somewhere.” “That’s it,” said ...”

“... Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections – Hanif Kureishi, for example – don ‘t of course tell us ...”

“... can call up, more or less at will, a would-be disarming cuteness of address, a somewhat chilled, self-loving geniality. Salinger reserves his cuteness for his fiction, Updike for his non-fiction. Indeed, Updike’s literary-professional demeanour, hugely prolific, well-mannered, prize-conscious, ever ready to grant interviews, write prefaces and ...”

“... O.K. ... Just as Grace Paley the pacifist and political activist is never polemical, preachy or self-righteous in her fiction, so Grace Paley the feminist is unpredictable: an artist, and not a propagandist. Of course, the predominant concerns of the Collected Stories are with women’s issues. Virtually all the stories are narrated from a woman’s ...”

“... and familiar (the meaning of memory, of nationhood and selfhood), the idiom entirely typical and self-regarding. England, England, in other words, is a book which not only poses questions about integrity and authenticity, but is itself something of a poser. This is, I’m sure, entirely by design: Julian Barnes is a writer who knows how to spot a fake. Last ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he did not mention its crucial point: did these events really happen, or was the climactic one a self-induced fantasy, something that took place only in Mary’s mind? Kipling tells the story as if the wounded airman were real, and the reader, too, accepts it for a fact, but critics have pointed out that he is more likely to be a hallucination, and have ...”

“... his position in relation to those so erroneously assumed by others in that type of jerky, tightly self-observant prose favoured by philosophers. ‘I want to indicate the type of account I believe is appropriate to pictorial meaning. It is an account that runs counter to a number of views widely held today of what it is for a picture to have meaning ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... everything the wrong way round.’ And that had to be their advantage. Indeed, the Columbians’ self-deprecating excuse became the basis of what he agrees to have been his most celebrated thought: that rather than start with everything at once, or start at the theoretically-appointed place, with iron and steel and machine tools, and work forwards, one might ...”

“... 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 ...”