“... more. Israel hoped that the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank would provide a facsimile of self-government and a safe but ineffectual outlet for Palestinian demands for liberation. But the PA’s shortcomings kept generating justifications for more active forms of struggle, which Hamas seized on. In 1994 it conducted its first suicide bombing inside ...”

“... be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on inaccuracies perpetrated by career biographers, manipulations that nudge her out of the official portraits. Biography is serious business these days. It underwrites the republication of a ...”

“... de Man: he quarrelled over it with the august interpretations of Heidegger. There is a measure of self-absorption about even the least of these pieces. They look forward as well as back, and one of their merits is that they often demonstrate how much can be said in a review or a relatively brief essay: which explains why de Man was so slow to publish a ...”

“... While he is married to Mary, the wives in his fiction march forth as his conception of her: self-serious, clutching tight to the progressive politics she inherited from her Unitarian minister father. When he begins to feel restless at the New Yorker and moves their young family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, beach views and shingled houses and the ...”

“... published in 1937), on the excellence of his own, or indeed any, system of strenuous self-criticism and self-discipline, which should lead a writer to cut and cut again. Kipling was a man who could hardly speak of himself without ironic quizzicality, without silences and reticences. The theory of the condensed ...”

“... so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn ...”

“... at the same time leaving the original Ronnie behind and forging new connections to a plausible self. I decided his family’s address at the time of his birth would be 167 Caledonian Road, because the address seemed right in class terms for the man I was inventing and also because I have a feeling for King’s Cross. I placed him at Blessed Sacrament ...”

“... brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He often remarked – it was one of his ...”

“... MotoringTom PaulinOr Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to tracethe Burma Campaign the war woundelocution lessons All Soulsthe office it’s a long way from Co ...”

“... art, Sipping at a spoonful of yoghurt And smiling at our smiles, described his dancing Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads (But only God, he said, can create a language). Journalists proffered, on platters of silence, Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –  ... At a giddy moment – To the belly-dancer, the ...”

“... Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands here, at this window, gazing out, not me who woke up late, when everyone had gone to work or school, but someone else, a man so like myself that nobody would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth – but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely register in words, unless I call it graceful and nomadic, some lost art of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight, the feel of distance singing in the flesh, that happiness-as-forage, bedding in, declining, making sense of what it finds ...”

“... Designated Mourner, a play about love, blood, pajamas, the current police state and the passionate self-love of each of us. Wally, sitting very still once at the beginning and once at the end, sets a cocktail napkin on fire. It flames out like Moses then goes lilting up and away into ash. Ash is astounding. Made out of death yet sort of offhand. Wally’s play ...”

“... loudly debated Visconti and Bergman, while the latter stared at the snow and shared booze, smoking self-rolled cigs and spitting. Every member of the Union was entitled to invite one adult guest. One evening, in late December 1980, just a few days before New Year’s Eve, my friend Liuba, a young animator artist, called to remind me to bring my passport to ...”

“... on what she called ‘legal medicine’, though she ‘found that no one, including alas! my own self, knew exactly what legal medicine was supposed to mean’. She proceeded intuitively, from a conviction that more violent crimes would be solved if only policemen were more observant at crime scenes (she was a great reader of Sherlock Holmes). The ...”

“... of the Fairies draped adoringly round his stupidity, in a way that the character’s own refined self would have been shocked by if he could ever have conceived it, but which the poet’s own even more refined self saw as a good, human (which is, creaturely) truth about love.I don’t want to work through all the ...”