“... the heart branches with its                     wild arteries – I own my self, I own my leaving – the falcon watching from the tree – I shall torch the crop that no one else                     have it whispers the air – & someone’s swinging from a rope, his rope – the eye ...”

“... or rather it was moving that no one thought about. We were each happy in the round cell of our self-determination, attentively falling out of love with the atrium of tomorrow, its muscle, its derring-do. The Situation Upstairs Like a forest fire in a jungle with no one to watch it, this sea breeze releases me to the cloud of knowing. There are beaters in ...”

“... which soon I shall turn into a pen again – brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless – I hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How ...”

“... batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY.     She is not ...”

“... when it is mentioned, Catholicism serves as a context for intellectual rather than spiritual self-examination. Ernst Untzinger, an EC bureaucrat of uncertain sexuality, ponders his own compulsive materialism and laments the fact that even when he visits the Pope he can’t help calculating his worldly riches (‘life-proprietor of the Sistine ...”

“... of the sort: ‘I, a Cretan, assert that all Cretans are liars.’ Deconstructive propositions are self-falsifying because they are presented in natural language; they are, moreover, not a stimulating mental game but a soul-destroying heresy. Real Presences traces this subversion of language and faith to the period between 1870 and 1930. Before that was ...”

“... long stretches his writing, where it’s not show-off clever, is appallingly careless. The plot is self-indulgently romantic, and Stern’s escapades in Africa are about as believable as Indiana Jones’s. Much of the narrative is propelled by petty spites (against feminism, notably). But with all its faults, News from Nowhere seems to me to be that rarest of ...”

“... book, or is this all just a waste of time?’ I reassured him. In view of Shelton’s immature self-assurance (he has just described the Dylan-Baez relationship as ‘one of the most intriguing show-business liaisons of the times’, a phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I ...”

“... consider somewhat privileged, somewhat arcane. Thus Lord Eccles is described as ‘opinionated, self-assured, a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’. Even if you find this account over-subtle you will still grasp that its subject is a very different sort of person from Richard Hoggart, ‘the grammar school extramural ...”

“... in revolutions ... During the physical struggle when singleness of eye and magnetism, devotion and self-sacrifice were needed, Abdullah would be too complex for a single purpose.’ Faisal could be run. Abdullah could not. Put aside the maundering downstage self-pity of the passage on Faisal and one sees a manipulator ...”

“... where Emma is a dilettante; socially and economically trapped where Emma is at large; Romantic and self-thwarted in her emotional life where Emma is carefree and self-indulged. However pointed and suggestive this contrast may be, it does not imply equivalence. Jane is outshone by Emma (so is the other Jane, Jane Bennett, by ...”

“... Carole Angier calls Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford ‘perhaps the two greatest artists in self-pity in English fiction’. Ford has the edge technically, particularly through his use of the unreliable narrator: for no one, in her own way, could be more reliable than a Jean Rhys heroine. The reader is never left in any doubt that things are just as bad ...”

“... of him. Rather, what one craves is a break-out of senses and sensibility from the prison-house of self. There’s self-reproach, even self-loathing, it may be, at times: it is nonetheless the ego that stands between the poet and his perceptions, condemning the world along with ...”

“... stance as a secular intellectual be regarded as evidence of spiritual error, or of a failure of self-knowledge? Can his commitment to the art of fiction remain unchanged? A collection of essays and reviews should give some hints as to what sort of artist Rushdie has been, or has wanted to be. Partly because of his punchy, no-nonsense style – a style in ...”

“... as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so it might never have been created had it not been for the remarkable things that happened to its author and his consciousness, as a result of a cocktail of alcohol and assorted drugs, and of the ...”