“... 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 ...”

“... the voice in which his poems spoke, already had a tinge of bardic anonymity, a suggestion that the self had indeed been humbled, but momentously: Seamus Heaney the man was being elected, so it seemed to him, into the role of Seamus Heaney, poet. If this makes him sound like George Barker, it absolutely shouldn’t. What is attractive about Heaney’s response ...”

“... politics; nobility and grandeur don’t, as with Elgar, wake doubts about a possible touch of self-pity. Verdi is at once exciting and safe. One reason why he seems safe may be that, after all, we don’t know him as well as we think. His life coincided with the high point of archive creation – after the establishment of reliable postal services and ...”

“... hardly ever recognised. Shafarevich’s nationalism is both an attempt to raise dwindling Russian self-esteem (as the patently faltering economy further belies the regime’s claims to socialism and to relative economic advancement) and a specific, intellectual response to the ‘cult’ of Jewish emigration, the ‘apotheosis of flight’, the tendency, as ...”

“... gospel for himself from the Bible’ would lead to infidelity – ‘You will unravel the web of self-sufficient inquiry’ – proved true not only for Francis but also for Fitzjames Stephen. Born into an Evangelical family with the habit of inquiry, and imagining himself, as he later said, ‘a highly intellectual little saint’, he passed gradually into ...”