“... that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have to be more determined, more committed and more self-reliant to do well at A-level than more privileged students.’ This worthiness should be tempered by the fact that still only 60 per cent of students at Bristol are from state schools, and only 11 per cent are from working-class backgrounds, compared to a ...”

“... plunges into chaos: pro-Bush rebels seize power in West; DC in Flames’; ‘Clinton declares self President for life’; ‘Bush executes 253 New Mexico Democrats.’ And once he was in the White House: ‘Bush – “Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”’ The opening story in the compendium is ‘Half-naked Kissinger ...”

“... But what if they had? The LRB recently received an e-mail from a company called Yellow Dragon Self Defence, informing us that ‘in your line of work … there is a high risk of being assaulted, abducted, even killed. I have read in the papers of many such incidences.’ Perhaps they were thinking of the non-story of last year in which someone who ...”

“... Let’s say a gallery. Let’s say ill weather. Let’s say you’ve movedfrom L’Arbre de Fluides to La Fenêtre. Let’s say you’re not Marie,not one of the Corps de Dame. Let’s say you’ve been better loved.Let’s say that one of these, for sure, is what you came to see.*Red and black. Heart and hand. Sand and salt. You make a note.The colours a cross-hatch ...”

“... the parents. George Monger: Marriage Customs of the World Had he mastered the thin domain of self-denial, replacing the skin with sleep, an implacable snow of mothering and cold valerian, the house of Spoken Word and Christmas Morn become the castle in a fairy tale where hearts are hung to dry on fatted string, he might have guessed the limits of that ...”

“... to the black behind the shadows,             the hand-shadow being cast by his one self on the dark,             by the single lightbulb behind him the hum, his own knuckles here and the tightly clenched fingers wrapped like a bird-beak around the chalk             gripping something to bring home to the nest ...”

“... But one of the supreme gods, Indra it was, was always horny for Ahalya. He lost self-control. One day, soon as Gautama went for his river wash and prayers at the bank     Indra was like a cloud ready to burst! And burst he did by spilling down to earth as Ahalya’s husband. Exact-same copy. But hornier! Horny as Ahalya and Gautama on ...”

“... No more soft explosions of hair in water – Diderot’s electric, scintillating extension of self, His thread of atoms glittering with static! – All senseless and endless as we are shown it, top heavy, twisted in fetters, Dragged along in the current squeezed sentimentally from the rock. Dawn must not be our metaphor, you understand. (The young man ...”

“... or a single tall one. Please return dishes to main room after using. Try a little subtlety in self-defence; it’ll help, you’ll find out. The boards of the cottage grew apart and we walked out into the sand under the sea. It was time for the sun to exhort the mute apathy of sitters, hangers-on. Ballast of the universal dredging operation. The device ...”

“... and ‘consciousness’ are tricky concepts. He appears to have at once a total disregard for the self and a sense of it as an unshakeable core. I could go on. Or I could direct to you to a hilarious, if slightly unkind website, www.kevinwarwick.org.uk, the home of ‘Kevin Warwick Watch’. Among the things it keeps count of are mentions of Mrs Warwick. The ...”

“... of childhood reminiscence, jazz and junk lore, obscene sexual anecdotes and fearless, often japing self-revelation – Laurie, with Pepper’s permission, asked some of his old bandmates, producers, drug dealers, prison cronies and girlfriends to add their own insightful (and often unflattering) comments. The resulting feuilleton was hailed as a poetic ...”

“... of In Memoriam and the fullest manuscript of ‘Maud’. The ramifications of Tennyson’s self-borowings can be followed more accurately and usefully; as for revision, two brief examples from ‘Maud’ may suffice to show the richness of the added material. In I iv the speaker has a vision of cruel and violent Nature: ‘And the whole little wood ...”

“... In the decades before and immediately following Independence, most Africans were either directly self-sufficient or part of an extended family that was – hardly anyone was more than one generation from the land. Politics was an urban pursuit, conducted at some distance from the realities of most peoples’ lives, and politicians could be certain that ...”

“... literature concerned with the effects of technology on American arts and manners. Even the self-made idiom of Still the New World passes through distinct layers from having been evolved in separate stages of composition. A thoughtful chapter about the dependence of privacy, in the fictions of realism, on a threat of publicity and exposure, was first ...”

“... Kafka, Nabokov, Grass, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Bellow, Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his remembered literary pleasures is astonishing, there is little ostentation in his manner. What most ...”