“... to ask. Eleni must have been a tough, shrewd, brave woman: I doubt whether she would have had the self-involved sentimentality to see herself as one of those ‘baby chicks, dyed a brilliant scarlet’ to be sold at Easter, and pecked to death by ‘ordinary fowl outraged at their unconventional plumage’. The dyeing and the selling are Mr Gage’s, and I ...”

“... felt the same, each in his own way – that what he really liked about me was a shadow-self of his own creation: someone who combined a colonial’s dash and freedom from convention with Jewish wisdom and an artist’s melancholy and percipience. No wonder he was disappointed! He was a great categoriser of people, and when he had a category he ...”

“... and often come close to deserving the Athenaeum’s strictures. Exaggeration and egregious self-praise are, alas, also still with us in the genre. The dustjacket of the Shell Guide claims that ‘none of the great many books’ on the city ‘delves as deeply into London’s historical and social background’. The genre suffers from another ...”

“... to solve it: the bourgeoisie applauds the ‘subversive’ artist as a licensed anti-self. Kings used to applaud their fools in much the same way. But Professor Brooke-Rose has no stomach for such grand or grandiose theories. Sounding more and more like Dame Helen, she proposes to get on with the job of analysing a specific text. She ...”

“... darkness of this Russian universe, there are other intelligent beings: ‘dozens of stubborn, self-contained individuals like me – each of us writing, with honour and conscience as his guides, all that he knew about our age ...’ The other belief is that their work will only appear long after they are all dead, hidden by friends and descendants in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the reader’s, and a childish pact is joined (as in the best romances). Tartt’s writing has the self-delighted explicitness and wonderment that we know so well from children’s fiction, or from adult versions like Swift and Dickens. This is not to be despised, for this wonderment returns fiction to its first principles, its primal scene. But it is ...”

“... man I’ve loved and remained married to?’ For Bernard, told all this by Jeremy, it is so much self-justifying delusion: She left the Party years before me, but she never cracked, she never sorted the fantasy from the reality. Politico or priestess, it didn’t matter, in essence she was a hardliner ... You were either with her, doing what she was ...”

“... 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 ...”