“... incoherent. But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess. Conversely, the conservative vision of society has never been very hospitable to liberal ideals of free speech, open competition, impartial ...”

“... a man committed to ‘a blurting boorishness and lack of refinement’, as well as ‘a self-abasing admiration for rigid order’. Like Hugh MacDiarmid, Paulin said, Hopkins had a ‘risky, over-the-top extremism’ to his imagination, and while in Ireland in 1887-8 gave vent in his verse to ‘revolutionary intoxication, an expressionist whap of ...”

“... we are told, a real possibility. Consider, for example, Eric Drexler’s tiny single-cell-scale self-replicating machines, the ultimate end of ‘nanotechnology’. These would be ideal for sorting through frost-bitten cells, molecule by molecule, putting them back into working order, and, maybe, adding new ones to make a new body (age of your choice) as ...”

“... would win. Her prizelessness needn’t be taken, as some obituarists have seemed to take it, as a self-evident proof of her work’s value – though it shows yet again that the best books often go ungarlanded. Angela’s ten works of fiction had something brilliant on every page, something which couldn’t have been produced by anyone else. But they aren’t ...”

“... in my mind as the most valuable part of the book.This may to some extent be because verse is more self-sufficient, self-contained, and can be cut, as so often it has to be cut for an anthology of this kind, without mortal danger. The extract from Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, for instance, stands quite well by ...”

“... strong Stephen Hero sense, in which the writer is projecting an aggrandised version of his own self and attempting through it to get at society, history, identity, the spirit of the age, all the big themes of the modern novel. Roughly speaking, there are two different sorts of story being told in High Cotton. The first deals with the narrator’s ...”

“... than perfunctorily grateful for. As flu submerges Mrs Marsh she makes a last attempt to assert her self-respect by keeping an appointment with the hairdresser, who has a special regard for her because she once told him, with a touch of old woman’s malice, that he looked as if he were about to go in for the Tour de France. Tony was delighted by that, and now ...”

“... by fear and secrecy ... whose every pleasure has a shadow of guilt and every passion a core of self-hatred’. Without the guilt and self-hatred there would be no pleasure. As in The God-Fearer, there are several inferred comparisons between Baisz’s republic of Sarmeda and the Soviet Union, the more effective because ...”

“... and the disintegration of the unified character with their overview, their version of unity (a self-mocking unity, full of pratfalls but nonetheless reassuring). In this novel humour is not the medium in which everything is suspended, it’s intermittent and not to be relied on, or possibly so black it’s hard to recognise. Jenny Diski’s oeuvre to date ...”

“... rather than eloquent. She never breaks out of the prefabricated language of TV commercials and self-help manuals that has surrounded her all her life. Her dead husband Marvin is, in her words, ‘permanently defunct in the living department’. The effect of removing Marvin from the living department and disposing of his remains in the gardening department ...”

“... Palliser may think that he can write like Jeffrey Archer, for instance, and his portrayal of a self-important politician-turned-bestseller might have a degree of rough comic vigour, but when he makes a cursory attempt at Archer’s style – in which willing nymphets are brought to ‘shuddering organisms’ – the result is neither accurate imitation nor ...”

“... Do women want equality? To the militant suffragettes campaigning before August 1914, the answer was self-evident. They wanted equality badly, and were ready to do battle for it. The aggressive action which backed their polemical crusade was designed to demonstrate possession of virtues previously considered to be essentially masculine: the capacity for public action and rational argument, physical courage, a ruthless drive for justice ...”

“... Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. Today’s Irish writers, he claims, have inherited a self-confidence ‘and (through Joyce and Beckett) a sense of belonging within the mainstream of European literature’. This simple fact of literary history might also go some way towards explaining the comparative demoralisation of English novelists: perhaps it ...”

“... consider a very important rhetorical figure (or ‘figure of thought’) which we may call the ‘self-excluder’. According to this figure, Sartre or Roland Barthes will heap obloquy on the ‘bourgeoisie’ while leaving quite unanswered the question of what ‘class’ they belong to themselves. The natural inference would be that they are members of the ...”

“... was, with Story consigned to the past tense only in a couple of passages at the end. Story was a self-made and largely self-taught writer. His father was killed on the Western Front in 1918, when Jack was one. His mother was supposed to be descended from a noble family. There are recurring allusions to her in the ...”