“... had grown enormously’ since he first met her. ‘She has become a lady of over-whelming self-confidence and self-importance,’ he told his diary. Yet, if that verdict is just, the mind-broadening seminars and the contacts with the intellectually sharp Mr Urban and others probably had quite a lot to do with 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for a public drubbing in language which he would have discarded as extreme (‘tasteless, tacky, self-centred’) in his back-bench heyday as a semi house-trained polecat. The army of rats has now been joined by Lord McAlpine of West Green, Thatcher’s ‘jolly bagman’, as he calls himself. Margaret Thatcher’s affection for the British construction ...”

“... am like Scrooge? Have I not renounced all for Art? The Scrooge-Christ of Art, who has hoarded his self to Writing the Father. And not gained the world. Because who buys his books? And lost his soul. Wherein lie all my profits?’ Lucchesi feels very good. No chance he’ll weep now. Raises window high to let in a blast of icy air. Inhales deep. The heat had ...”

“... Although I knew him to be some what more literary-worldly than he liked to seem, the drift of his self-presentation had always been to stand craggily aloof from metropolitan book-circuses. Also his most recent Moortown poems had impressively traversed the dead-end he seemed to have run into with the blood-drenched Crow. He appeared to have found a new line ...”

“... started work, you have to be elderly and are likely to be increasingly indulgent to your younger self. Freedman seems conscious that she is working from rather a small selection, but says that her theoretical base is ‘broadly conceived and interdisciplinary. My work is heavily indebted to the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology, history, literary ...”

“... ones, this one, now, here.’ This is therapy writing. As Ash admits, ‘Diaries, they’re so self-indulgent ... If you write something down, it goes away.’ In ‘God’s gift’ we don’t know enough to care about the ‘I’ circling round the subject of her lost love or the ‘you’ she’s addressing. Smith makes a virtue of avoiding endings, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and expressive manner than traditional biographical methods allow. Dutch brims with whimsy and self-conscious writerliness. Every other sentence swims in a coulis of the author’s self-regard. ‘Memory. Desire,’ muses ‘Morris’ in his prologue. ‘What is this mysterious yearning of biographer for subject, so akin ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bone to pick with graveyards’ stuff – but the book raises some laughs when the humour is less self-consciously lugubrious. A Touch of Love is harder to defend from a strictly avant-garde point of view. Using a broadly naturalistic idiom, it tells the story of a writer brought low by the strain of living up to his own avant-garde aspirations. The main ...”

“... get to hear is semi-professional melancholians beating on tiny little tin drums, squelching, self-pitying, huffing, puffing and generally wallowing in their own bubble-bath solemnity: the sound of the Fabian Society drinking whisky sours in a hot-tub at a nudist colony. Colin McAdam isn’t from round here: he’s Canadian and lives in Australia. Some ...”