“... and curves and flat, bright colours; the subversion of women as mothers or sex objects; Warholian self-promotion and self-mythologising; the refusal of perspective (in both senses). And also a quality that runs through all her work which you might call childlike ...”

“... seasons. Henry VIII, whose faithful servant More professed to be and for the most part was, was a self-willed tyrant whose last resort against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as head of the church in England. In this he had the counsel of the ruthless and crafty Thomas ...”

“... the population. Frustrated by the opposition-controlled National Assembly, he made aggressive and self-defeating moves against it, going so far as to decree its dissolution in 2017 – though, as we can see, it has continued to function. But it’s also true that, economically, any Venezuelan leader would have been weakened by the slump in global oil prices ...”

“... uncertainties. These are captured in what might be called the poem’s burlesque of ethnography: a self-imposed task which is also a game, in which an interest in culture both demands and serves as a pretext for continued detachment. Starting out as a city poet of Boston and Brooklyn, Mlinko has since become a poet of seemingly perpetual itinerancy. She began ...”

“... Or something like it? We are heading into dangerous territory here, as neither Tessa, for all her self-consciousness, nor her creator seems to find anything a bit silly about this clichéd encounter between an Anglo-Saxon woman on holiday and an earthy foreign type. Given Kane’s capacity to micro-analyse her characters’ motivations, this lapse seems ...”

“... to his non-fiction: the loosely structured, discursive essays he favours easily accommodate self-reflection and digression. This means that he has more of an opportunity to write about what really interests him – which, most of the time, is himself. Dyer’s last work of non-fiction was an autobiographical essay entitled Out of Sheer Rage, which is ...”

“... the transition from middle-class suburban Sandycove son to college man about town with enviable if self-conscious ease, helped along by his until now largely theoretical knowledge of Dublin’s haunts and late-night hang-outs: the Rí-Rá, the Break for the Border, O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street. He sinks pints of Guinness with classmates from all corners of ...”

“... things – was so generalised for children of that period as to be unremarkable. The dream of a self-sufficient, ‘de-anglicised’ Irish culture was still alive for many who had grown up around the advent of independence, and, if anything, had only been made more vivid in the years after the Second World War by the attendant notion that an authentic ...”

“... or Debussy. In the later works, however technically accomplished they are, he seems increasingly self-conscious in the sense of the epithet that connotes contrivance. One is often moved to be sure; but there is also a sense of being complicit in something not entirely nice. The puzzle about Puccini is why this should be so. Here, perhaps, is a ...”

“... in the New Statesman praised him for turning ‘his appalled gaze inwards’ – but his self-absorption has some unfortunate consequences.There’s an all too famous passage in the book in which Morrison describes in unashamedly erotic terms undressing his daughter. He goes on to say: ‘a child in my lap, being read to, and I find myself ...”

“... out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours.’ The chapter ends with sad reflections on what lay ahead for those present. Hugh Fraser ‘died of a broken heart’ when Lady Antonia left him for Harold Pinter. Pat died of cancer. Jebb ‘committed suicide with a ...”

“... that Chatterton raises in his attack on Walpole, and concentrates instead on pride and poetic self-deification. As an exemplar of the egotistical sublime, Wordsworth’s Chatterton makes Rowley the idol of his pride, the projection of what Hobbes called ‘gloriation of mind’. But even this elevates more than it deserves a literary daring that sprang ...”

“... can generate is itself. The gloom never quite lifts. ‘The desire to exploit the possibilities of self-transformation may burn bright in the cosmetic and surgical industries,’ Warner acknowledges towards the end of this demanding, immensely rewarding book, ‘but stories disclose a growing unease with the menace of different selves taking over the real ...”

“... riff about being cheered for breaking wind in the street (after hours of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought came in my mind. Supposing that they knew this old man walking along Long Acre and farting was Stephen Spender – what would they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not have been amused. This is not the utterance of the goose or juggins ...”

“... suddenly soars with great style, wielding his pen like the sword of truth over the heads of these self-satisfied popinjays. ‘Glasgow,’ he writes, ‘for this East Coast writer, could be summed up in the phrase “coarse and vulgar” – a snooty Edinburgh perception of the place which has not entirely vanished today.’ Many writers were drawn to point ...”