“... off to prison, having failed to dispose of an incriminating Porsche. Saunders likes parodying self-help routines and motivational speeches. He’s particularly obsessed with injecting bland menace into the word ‘super’, as in ‘“Super!” said Tom Rodgers’ or ‘Loyalty – it’s super!’ or ‘Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate!’ ‘Tonight ...”

“... the Palestinians are struggling to consolidate a genuinely representative Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority and to handle the huge economic and political challenges resulting from Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while the Sharon government finishes cantonising the West Bank, and Gaza remains walled off. Unable to achieve even the ...”

“... are still in Mamarrosa, but the register and cast of the narrative have subtly shifted. Stanton, a self-absorbed expatriate English writer, hopelessly sidetracked by self-doubt and drink, has come to the village to write a novel about William Blake: ‘He read over the last few pages on the screen, making deletions and ...”

“... dangerous, it’s just as well we went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the prophecies self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: ‘The Middle East is a jungle, where only might speaks.’ See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut. Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that the US and Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true that Olmert ...”

“... to a story at the opposite pole of experience. Louise and Mattachich – rich, greedy, stupid, self-absorbed and casually anti-semitic as they turn out to be – are an inspired counterpoint to Jacobson’s own history: his grandfather, a rabbi in Lithuania; his parents, immigrants to South Africa in the 1920s; his upbringing in past-its-best ...”

“... in the centre of my body,’ ‘the idea had started to grow blunt, worn down by its own regular self-contemplation.’ Now that Zoe’s son is nine, the astonishing primal connection has sunk out of sight. In place of it, the two build carefully, out of their mutually considerate talk (George is a very nice boy), civilised relations. Simpson understands ...”

“... the idealisation of little girls in Victorian culture is an attempt to repossess the remembered self rather than a wish for sexual possession of the other. Though Robson concedes that elements of sexual exploitation are present in all this, she moves away from the assumption that repressed sexuality was a dominant impulse in Victorian culture, and one which ...”

“... started investigating the matter. Comedians know it as well: hence the increasingly destructive self-importance of, say, Tony Hancock, with his futile efforts to get to grips with Bertrand Russell, both on screen and off. (Hence, too, the bizarre comic erudition of Ken Dodd, who has an enormous collection of theoretical writings about humour, and is fond of ...”

“... covered in dust and grime,’ he complains at the scene of battle – Ishiguro’s prose tends to self-parody. J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, give much more effective accounts of wartime Shanghai: their sense of place is more vivid, and the ways in which the war dims ‘the brightest lightbulb in the ...”

“... quite different? For contrivances such as these the novelist could be forgiven a Jamesian note of self-congratulation and self-encouragement, usually, in the Master’s case, expressed in French: voyons, voyons, mon bon! Let us see what I, and later what they, can make of this treatment. When Briony comes to the rescue of ...”

“... I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her self-effacement. In the early 1980s, Larkin was lauded and Amis was famous; Jennings was reading with some student poets at the Old Fire Station arts centre. She was shy, and that brought out the shyness in me, so I didn’t speak to her. But I knew who she ...”

“... Nation’ came, but it began to look increasingly threadbare as Ireland boomed with an economic self-confidence which seemed founded on exactly the sort of social consensus thought likely to produce long, accomplished novels. As early as the 1960s O’Connor and O’Faolain had begun to go out of fashion, their demise chronicled in John Montague’s ...”

“... Fortysomething Cath, Australian, veteran of the barricades, self-described ‘bedrock feminist’ and ‘unreconstructed left-winger’, works for a down-town investment bank. Her much-loved husband, twenty-five years older, has Alzheimer’s, and for the first time in her life the free-spirit, freelance travel writer understands the need for real money ...”

“... We go out on a tribute to Trotsky: ‘In the rush of confession, revision, repudiation, self-advancement and mere ageing that has overtaken the New York crowd, the idea of the fearless unpublished, unimpressed and uncompromised intelligence has taken rather a beating. That is why, long after Trotskyism has become irrelevant, the admonishing figure ...”

“... face. Breaking this locution out into an upper-case ‘Other’ introduces an opposition between self and Other cherished by literary theorists but alien to the dramatic exigencies of this moment of dialogue. Earlier, speaking of the Transjordanian tribes, Havrelock writes: ‘They pledge obedience to Joshua as long as “Yahweh your God [her italics] is ...”