“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Little Me – a fictional autobiography published by Patrick Dennis 30 years ago in mockery of the self-adulatory memoirs which gushed, as they still gush, from actor-dramatists and other multi-talented luvvies? Little Me would not only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knife. Don’t said the cut. The knife needs to cut but is disgusted by blood: the apologetic and self-hating cut has to bleed in order to feel. Swenson’s brilliant poem sets out the archetypal roles of slasher and victim, sadist and masochist, male and female, that have become central obsessions of contemporary culture. Susanna Moore’s novel In the ...”

“... paradox of literary survivance [sic], crucial to Western high culture from Pindar to Mallarmé and self-evidently central to Chardin’s painting, has altered.’ Indeed it has, and there may be ample reason to worry about what cyber-space and virtual reality are going to do to the so-called Gutenberg galaxy. But though one may share his nostalgia for the ...”

“... form of perpetual present, one that implies too many quick changes backstage, as though the self-inflicted, then eluded, task of showing exactly how a preposterous love can filter into preposterous sourness and back again were too much for the writer’s skills. But then, who wants another finely-crafted psychological novel about coupledom? Despite the ...”

“... some gap or dip occasionally disclosed’. Possibly they also talked about alienation, loneliness, self-disgust and self-forgiveness, since both of them were something other, or more, than the bird-and-weather writers their readers knew. In May 1914 Thomas tells Frost that he ought to get started on a book about speech and ...”

“... or enumerating, of a woman’s exquisite body parts with a mixture of fetishistic rapture and male self-regard. His other classical template is the flaying of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the satyr’s terrible cry: ‘Who is it that tears me from myself?’ The flaying image is arguably more convincingly and consistently applicable to a study of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clearly an animal. It had a distinct ‘head’ and a ‘tail’ (like the early embryo); it was self-propelling, lived in flocks and even died. It went into the egg, Andry speculated, held the door shut behind it, and grew up. The role of the egg in spermism was obvious. Though huge, it could be seen as providing food, lots of it, and a soft, roomy ...”

“... interested in what it means to be told your sexuality is disgusting: what it does to your sense of self, and how it contaminates desire. His writing is unusual in combining Hollinghurst’s frankness with an agonised sensitivity to how that frankness can be perceived.In What Belongs to You (2016), Greenwell’s first novel, the narrator recalls how the ...”