“... element of wish-fulfilment can have some disturbing effects, as Paul Williams revealed in a candid self-analysis: ‘There’s a terrible thing that happens ... I find that the better the performance – you know when Dylan, when I was like, sitting in the audience in Berkeley in’86 – Dylan’s doing “Lenny Bruce” and I’m thinking “God! this is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... At the same time he was obsessed with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not very bright; yet at the same time we are not openly invited to shake our fists or hiss. Compare Dickens’s treatment of Mrs Jelly-by in Bleak House. As high-minded neglecters of their own children the two women resemble each ...”

“... revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized fixation on matters of literary rank – a fixation perhaps Maileresque in its immensity and scope. The settings, we might say, are different, drabber, Hull not Brooklyn, and so on, but the ache for supremacy is ...”

“... Spain. The Spanish galleon is in turn captured by a French ship, the captain of which, a noble and self-sacrificing individual named Déterville, falls instantly and desperately in love with her but, concealing his passion, looks after her with tender care on their homeward journey (which is also a time-journey, for we skip two centuries) to France. Meanwhile ...”

“... as ever, are plain enough. After 1912, without compromising his identity as a solitary tramper and self-communer, he developed a circle of new friends who helped him to make the most of his personality rather than sorrowfully submitting to the miseries it produced. With Clifford Bax he rediscovered some of his undergraduate jauntiness; in Eleanor Farjeon he ...”

“... managed not to sound nauseatingly heartfelt. His voice lacks pretension, disclaims rhetoric and self-regard; he is, apparently, without design. The first of these moments of booming meditation was an introduction to ‘My Hometown’ (from his latest album Born in the USA), and Springsteen made it both personal and typical: he spoke of his sadness at the ...”

“... in the first days of Queen Victoria’s reign, loved men and women indiscriminately without undue self-laceration, without visible private guilt or degrading public shame’. So of course might the Dodds of today, but Gay suggests – and indeed the diary entries show it – that Dodd’s feelings were an inspiration to him, a source of psychic energy and ...”

“... cryptic, the sexual relationship is fully lit. Guerrillas tells how an outcast, hustler and self-proclaimed revolutionary, Jimmy Ahmed, has returned from London to his native island, and has formed a commune for drop-out youths. He takes up with a wandering Englishwoman, Jane, who has come looking for action in the Third World and has found this corner ...”

“... the athletics in bed which the modern novel goes in for are beginning today to sound almost as self-consciously enacted: as if there was a gap between what the writer really felt and what he expected language to do for himself and his reader. And yet that is not the case here. Reading the novel, one is convinced that Morgan, no less than ...”