“... Always read the acknowledgments. These preliminary matters often say more about the real, sad, self-deluding and lonely life of the writer and scholar than any number of biographies: the long-suffering husbands and wives; the neglected children; the countless hours spent on research in libraries and archives; the pathetic gratitude to agents and outside research bodies; the sabbatical leave kindly granted; the endless discussions with brilliant and understanding friends or fellow Faculty, who nonetheless bear no responsibility for any errors that remain ...”

“... Leader are thoroughly alienated, but in opposite ways: the Leninist Leader displays radical self-instrumentalisation on behalf of the Revolution, while in the case of the Stalinist Leader, the ‘real person’ is treated as an appendix to the fetishised and celebrated public image. No wonder the official photos of the Stalinist era were so often ...”

“... does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He ...”

“... and that in turning to her, he was showing the dominance of his literary over his political self. Even if one leaves aside the question of whether ‘polities’ versus ‘literature’ is not a false disjunction – he said that above all else he wanted to make ‘political writing into an art’ – as well as the question of whether there might not ...”

“... within the PCF as well. His revolutionary fervour was exemplary but his style was undeniably self-advertising and his ambition was clear. It was noted, too, that when, in between jail sentences, he got married (to a PCF militante), the ceremony – amazingly for a PCF leader – took place in church. He moved his now-widowed mother into the new marital ...”

“... landings, and Monty had already been scathing about what he had heard of their performance. His self-confidence, like that of his army, was now at its zenith. He, and they, alone knew how to fight and win: that was the Monty message, and he took pleasure in the exclusive arrogance with which he had infected his own command. It was not wholly justified. The ...”

“... and whose own vitality, unfortunately, has so rarely been explained or defended by philosophic self-reflection that it can easily seem to go by default. For all its abundance, however, American literary theorising can also strike the sceptical outsider as remarkably provincial – ‘devoured’, to use Arnold’s phrase, by crochets and fancies as if ...”

“... lover – ‘every man’s love affair with America’ – and Ernest Hemingway his idea of a self-like literary champ, it might also be said that his astronauts, his boxers, his single-minded karmie killers, his existential heroes, Greenwich Village idiots, his political ogres and saints, his high-minded Trillings, turncoat Podhoretzes, his ...”

“... posturing, and advance by means of evolving figurative patterns rather than by any rigorous self-questioning. In idealising the pragmatist individual, for example, William likes to evoke the kinetic energy of the body, with words like ‘turn’ or ‘set at work’ or ‘actions’, that sound like casual evocations of his outdoorsy athleticism. On ...”

“... rich tangle of ideas about women and independence, with an undefined femininity seen as closer to self-sufficiency than a more assertive style of occupying space. Christine’s idea of camouflaged autonomy seems to be something of a shared ideal, or shared illusion. Lydia is less intellectual and academic: she did bar work while Christine worked towards a PhD ...”

“... Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s sacrifice; outpourings of gratitude and love; self-excoriation for insufficient ...”

“... Some sixty years on, and the terms in which he construes the drama between the absent self and the dreams or ‘tales of old disguisings’ have hardly changed. The melodrama, of course, remains too, and is present in nearly all of Pound’s most resonant moments: ‘As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill/ from the wreckage of Europe, ego ...”

“... of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring. One arrow points in, the ...”

“... might properly alienate readers only slightly attracted to the lure of the Master. But the self-consciousness is here calculated. Isabel is a heroine in triplicate. She has just walked into a novel; she thinks of herself in heroic terms; and a group of gazers – or readers – watchful as a Greek chorus but endowed with greater agency, seems to have ...”

“... Europe’s cathedrals. Bolaño is plainly sympathetic to this frightened old man caught between self-justification and remorse, but gives him his comeuppance all the same: ‘And then the storm of shit begins.’ On the other side – the side of revolution, disorder and failure – are Bolaño’s (anti-)heroes. From the first paragraph of the story ...”