“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”